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An Ale For the Fallen

I’ve heard you can either leave it graveside or pour some off.  The choice of action is mine when the events leading up to it are well out of my control.  This is not so dire as a real life death, but when a core guild member abruptly leaves the feelings follow a similar path of remorse and remembrance.

The guilds I find usually have two basic principles: (1) play the game the way you want to spend your precious time playing, and (2) keep the air clear.  What my guilds lack in purpose is well made up for it in community.  People come and go (mostly leaving for something less casual), but a core group of guildies remains.  Occasionally someone in the core group will leave as well.  It sucks, but it sucks more when they leave on bad terms. Continue reading An Ale For the Fallen

Her Way of the Shield

I am not a tank. If you need a healer or ranged DPS, I have more MMO experience than I sometimes care to admit. My view is that having something beating on your head is a bad tactic, to be avoided. In group situations, however, I love my tanks, and they love their shields. Blocking with a shield is much better than blocking with your face.

I do not often post just to toss out a link, but that is a great post about a rather different approach to the game than mine. If you are anything like me and want to see how the other half lives, check out the shield on that lass.

: Zubon

Hat tip: Syp

It’s the Little Things

Should I get excited about updates to Restaurant City? It is probably my favorite Facebook game. In my defense, it is not that exciting, but it added a bunch of new things to click and ways to interact with your restaurant and your friends.’ You can now protect your friends’ restaurants from predatory penguins and sleeping bears. Let me tell you, we often have sleepy bears around my house.

Players now have the opportunity to clean toilets by hand. Joy! If only it were a one-click function in real life.

: Zubon

Computer maintenance is also one-click in Restaurant City. Convenient!

Towards a Perpetual Stream of Events

I like festival time in Middle-earth. There is a festival for each season, and each runs about a month, so either it is festival time now, or it was last month, or it will be next month. World of Warcraft has something similar with its seasonal events. About half of each month is a festival.

As games age and have more events, they should repeat and accumulate rather than cycling out. All seasonal and holiday content can be re-used for future years. (I gladly exempt Kingdom of Loathing‘s Crimbo season from this rule, as I always look forward to the next winter solstice’s insanity. They do recycle all the other holidays, however, and they appear whenever either the real-world or in-game calendar would have them.) Just keep adding a few more each year until the game world is always having some kind of festival. If you run out of seasonal and holiday events, re-invigorate some little-used town with a local event. Have competing local events on the same theme. Come to think of it, having competing potato queens as event quest NPCs would be awesome.

City of Heroes has a slightly different take on this. Instead of adding new holidays each year, they add new events to existing holidays. The previous content still exists, but each year makes it bigger. Halloween features trick or treating and the great pumpkin and costumes and a haunted giant and zombie attacks and the apocalypse and oh my goodness.

: Zubon

Comment Spotlight

Sometimes when you receive a comment, there are so many things you want to say that you cannot say any. You can do little but regard it with wonder. As with a poem or a koan, the discussion would be far longer than the original. Rather than leave the lantern beneath a bushel, in the spirit of Warrior Wisdom Fridays, we present the pronouncement of jon:

RMT proponents are so amusingly shallow emotionally (hence easily manipulated by game devs). You people deserve to be parted with your money.
The “directs your efforts away from the unemployed” quote illustrates the mindset of RMT proponents quite a bit. Continually frustrated by their own perceived inability to compete with fellow MMO players for virtual status, they champion a form of meta-gaming where money, instead of merit, can buy status within the community.
While they would have people believe their desire for RMT based games is simply about enabling them to enjoy the game in their own unique flowery way. it’s really about finally being able to show up the “unemployed” guy. Ironically the unemployed guy (who never really existed in the first place), bored by MoneyQuest™ goes and plays something where achievement is rewarded, leaving the RMTers high and dry with nobody to show off to.
This RMT fixation indicates self-esteem and confidence issues to me. Take a break from the XP potions and zombie pandas. Use the extra money for a session with a therapist.

Long live fiero.

: Zubon

Blame November Rain

This week has been really “blah” all around.  There have been some exciting things.  Like a possible new boss battle in Guild Wars.  The Volume 1, epic quests becoming soloable in Lord of the Rings Online.  And of course, the Evil Empire’s RMT sale of drunk panda pets.  It’s all great, I guess.  I would probably care more if it had not rained the past two weekends.

Mostly I have been plugging away at Borderlands.  I gave up on multiplayer.  Yes, I have tried every suggestion (GameRanger, Hamachi, port opening, etc.), and 90% of the time the system refuses.  What drives me absolutely batty is that 10% of the time it lets me co-op and nothing has changed!  Until I see a fix from Gearbox, I am just going to assume I bought and am playing a singleplayer FPS.  And, quite a good one at that.

Last night I decided to head off to bed after turning in a quest, and along the way I got a purple-named revolver that shoots AoE electrical bursts.  I stayed up for another half an hour just roaming around the main zone looking for bandits to electrocute with magnum bullets.

–Ravious
she sure got the boogie

Re-Quest

My buddy invites me to his Ventrilo server, so we can chat while we are in our respective games. He is running his five-man dailies in WoW, I am starting a second playthrough in Borderlands.

“So, what’s this ‘playthrough’ BS? Does anything change, or do you just do the same boring-ass quests over again? Who wants to do that?”

“Aren’t you playing WoW right now?”

: Zubon

We Are All RMTers

Many developers have recognized that “play as much as you like” is leaving money on the table, while “pay as much as you like” directs your efforts away from the unemployed and towards capturing as much consumer surplus as possible.

WoW quietly became a came with a cash shop, only the cash shop offered account/character services rather than the usual cosmetic items, bonus xp, and sometime uber loot. WoW has officially started its cash shop. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ has started with the adventure pack, DDO is now a F2P (free to pay, free to play) game, but I don’t recall hearing any RMT for Asheron’s Call. Most of the recent releases have their cash shops built right in, and others are adding them. The more unfortunate games are adding core services and things that were supposed to be part of the basic package as cash add-ons. Wizard101 has been bulking up its shop.

Which games are left without ways for you to spend dollars beyond a monthly fee?

: Zubon

Custom Design

The following is a guest post by Moormur.

Greetings, readers! My name is Moormur. Some of you may know me from LOTROCast or the Galactic Holofeed, podcasts I co-host both with a very able crew. I am also an avid reader of all the stuff here at Kill Ten Rats. I refrain from posting commentary on my podcast websites for whatever reason, so I have asked Ethic here at Kill Ten Rats if he didn’t mind a guest column.

I’ve been thinking lately of a trend of sorts in the MMO developing community-player designed content. I’m not talking about sandbox MMOs those are really a topic for another time and place. I’m talking about when developers release a set of tools in a theme park style MMO that allows players to create missions. City of Heroes, as far as I know, was really the first to do this. Now, my former MMO Star Wars: Galaxies has put out their own set of tools with the Chronicle Master.

Continue reading Custom Design