.

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.

.

Referrer Links 2: Browser Games

This is the other post, where you can leave comments with referrer links for whatever browser-based game you play that gives you a link to have all your friends click. Visit your MiniCity? Have them killed by zombies and werewolves? Sign up for your flash games site? Great.

I recommend linking with the site name, what it is, and what you (and they) get for using that link. Example: KONGREGATE, a flash games site. If you sign up from that, I get points that put a useless number by my name. You get absolutely nothing.

If you would like to have a post removed (quit, game run by evil aliens, etc.), comment again or e-mail me, and I can delete old comments. We may have multiple, competing codes/links for the same game: whee! If the game in question is a “real” game, like an MMO or something that would not get you banned from most message boards for posting it, use this post. Please be patient if the comment does not appear immediately, as I will need to check the spam filter before and after work.

: Zubon

Referrer Links 1: MMOs

I have been meaning to do this for a while, and a comment yesterday reminded me. Many games give you bonuses for inviting friends and such, mostly if you are the source for their initial subscription. Feel free to use the comments from this thread to toss up your referral links, “e-mail me for a code,” codes, etc., whatever is relevant to your game. I suggest putting the name of the game in all caps at the top, then saying what they need to do to get the referral, then listing what you and they get from it. “What they get from it” is a useful incentive if they get more than just signing up on their own. City of Heroes, for example, has “welcome back” codes (account inactive for 90+ days) that gives you and your friend 15 days each when they re-subscribe. This is good for everyone, except perhaps the company involved.

Example: WIZARD101, a kid-friendly MMO that plays a lot like Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokémon. Friend code: 49090-08124-81429-46863. If you use my code and subscribe or buy $10 in crowns, we each get 1250 crowns. You might also get a pet or something; the page equivocates.

If you would like to have a post removed (unsubscribed, ran out of codes, etc.), comment again or e-mail me, and I can delete old comments. We may have multiple, competing codes/links for the same game: whee! If the game in question is one of those browser-based things like “have all your friends click this link to be eaten by zombies” or MiniCities or such, please use this post. Please be patient if the comment does not appear immediately, as I will need to check the spam filter before and after work.

: Zubon

Video Game Voyeurism

I’ve always liked to spectate people playing video games, ever since the ability was added in online games.  Guild Wars World Championships were to me what the World Series was to a baseball fan.  I would watch and chat with other players in observer mode  focusing on the intense Guild Versus Guild battles between the best players in the world.  Or there was that one time Nihilum did a live Sunwell Plateau (World of Warcraft) raid from four different vantage points.  Even a quick break in Team Fortress 2 to spectate a spy taking down five cart pushers can be entertaining while I chew down some air-travelled White Castles. 

I had an all-time high (or low) this weekend amassing hours of video game voyeurism via X-Fire’s live video streams.  A gamer with a good connection and computer can stream in real-time the game he or she is playing, while a chat room is created so that viewers can chat with the player and create a running peanut gallery.  This past weekend I vicariously “played” Prototype, Mass Effect, and even Darkfall.  I have never experienced any of these games, but I am already planning to buy Mass Effect.  I also have a much better feel for Darkfall watching a live stream than any “professional” reviewer can give me.  The streaming gamer is a personal performer, demoer, and spokesperson for the game.  Developers couldn’t ask for better advertising.

There was one small hitch.  The most popular and most numerous live streams seem to be World of Warcraft arena PvP.  I don’t understand this because the information to noise ratio is pitifully low when watching World of Warcraft PvP via the lowered-resolution stream.  I can only surmise that the live streams become some sort of PvP community in and of themselves.  This is not necessarily the hitch.  The hitch is I did want to see some World of Warcraft raid or dungeon, but I had to pull up each World of Warcraft stream in order to figure out what the player was showing.  Requiring a little description for each gamer’s stream would help greatly (e.g., Mass Effect just starting, WoW arenakekeke, L4D noob watch me suck).

The service is still in beta for X-Fire users, but I expect that whole communities and services could occur around this feature.  Instead of game companies performing demos at E3 for journalists, the developers could bypass and give a demo straight to the masses.  New guildies could be tutored on a raid.  Personal vendettas could be resolved.  The list is endless.  I am pretty excited about this, and maybe I will find something worthwhile to stream in the future.

–Ravious
on the arm of a blind man

Best Pricing Model

I must credit Wizard 101 for having the best pricing model of any MMO. There are no close competitors. First, you have two options: monthly subscription or pay by the area. The former includes not only the standard discount for multi-month subscriptions, but also a family plan for multiple accounts. You have probably heard about this from other reviews, but if you want to play with your kids, you get a per-account price only slightly higher than the per-month fee on a year-long subscription. This seems like a much better offer than a zebra mount.

The pay-by-zone option is what I always thought D&D Online should have been using: buy the dungeons like you would buy pen-and-paper modules. You buy crowns (500-750 per dollar, depending on how many you buy at once), and you can use those to buy zones or for some microtransactions I haven’t explored. $10 gets you the full Wizard City plus a little of Krokotopia. $80 gets you lifetime access to the entire game, with some change left over. If you thought the Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ $200 lifetime subscription option was awesome, how can you beat that? About $20 of that $80 is Grizzleheim, a five-zone “world”; I will let others argue about whether that should be considered a regular update or a first expansion pack. (Pay-by-zone does not pair up with the family account thing.)

Oh, and there’s a non-time-limited free trial.

I have been noticing game cards at the gas station lately, and I see that Wizard 101 has them as well. And they come with an exclusive bonus pet, that’s nice. If you were considering dropping $10 to try a month or the rest of Wizard City, this is probably your better option. Hmm, maybe I will swing by 7-11 sometime and give the rest of Wizard City a shot.

: Zubon

Guild Recruitment Pre-Launch

I was recently looking at the guild recruitment forums in SWTOR. Considering the game isn’t launching any time this year, it’s a surprisingly active forum. The first recruitment thread I clicked on had a link to a website which just dropped my jaw. The leader of the guild has invested in custom art for his slick website and a Ventrilo server. There was so much effort expended on this recruitment effort that I actually had to take a step back and wonder. Why do guilds recruit pre-launch at all?

Continue reading Guild Recruitment Pre-Launch

The Problem, In a Nutshell

Melmoth discusses:

Look, if I fight wolves in the dwarf starter area, and I kill the requisite hundred and fifty thousand million of them for the Wolf-Slaughterer title, it’s fair to say that I’m pretty good at killing wolves, some might say that I am accomplished if not a little genocidal. Therefore, if I then go to another area, further afield than where one might find a new character normally, I should not find super wolves, ten times the power of a normal wolf, who have but to look at me in a slightly disapproving manner for all my armour to jettison from my body and my skeleton to explode out of my skin and bury itself five feet under the ground. I am a wolf slayer! Look! You gave me a bloody title to acknowledge the fact that I spent a lot of time killing wolves, why can I not kill these wolves? ‘Oh’, say the developers, ‘but these are different wolves’. Different how exactly? Were they privately educated? Have members of their number graduated from Sandhurst? Did they train at Hereford in the use of special tactics and weapons?

The epic journey from pig to pig I comment with this image. That’s basically the state of things. The only thing keeping you from leveling on boars from 1 to the cap is that you must complete some quests to get access to zones, like exiting the newbie instance or the faction grind to get into Lothlorien, where the level 61 pigs are. You did not think of “access to higher-level pigs” as one of the benefits of that elf faction, eh? You haven’t even seen the edges of the box you’re trying to think outside of.

I pull this example from The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, but it is almost universal. My Dark Age of Camelot (Albion) character could do just the same, from piglets to rooters with some zombie pigs in between. I have killed the same goblin 100,000 times, with him in a variety of hats and colors.

: Zubon

4/10. Now what?

EG’s re-review of Darkfall is here.

Very good review, in my opinion. Just talking about the review in itself, that’s all. Enjoyable and informative, as reviews should be. This is why a second review was needed, and EG did the right thing on this one. People will say it doesn’t change anything; the faithful will keep playing it, the loathers will continue to loathe. But this is missing the point. The second review (and a good one like this one, at that) was needed because there’s tons of people that could -still- be looking for information about the game and could -still- use a good review of it. It changes exactly what needed to be changed; the replacement of a poor review with one of much better quality.

Does it change things about the game? To me? No. When reading the first poor review, with its errors (factual or not) notwithstanding, I knew the game wasn’t as bad as it was painted, but I also know the picture the review was attempting to present wasn’t that far off either. I don’t like using scores myself, and never liked it as a reviewer, but I can say that while I knew the game couldn’t possibly be a 2/10, I also knew it couldn’t possibly be 7/10 or higher either. The original review, terrible as it was in almost every metric you could apply to a review, was essentially not wrong in spirit. Unfortunately that spirit was buried under piles and piles of garbage. It was a bad review, but essentially not as wrong as the faithful claimed.

I wonder what happens now. Do people still care?

Does Wizard 101 Gameplay Get Good?

Over the past couple of nights, I have run through all the free content in Wizard 101 (my apologies for not asking for a referral beforehand). Is this pretty much what the entire game is like? There are a few buffs, heals, shields, pets, etc., but most of the time is spent with attacks that have a summon animation. There are some tactical options, but mostly it is hitting an attack and waiting out the 5-10 second animation that you have now seen a couple dozen times. Most things drop in a few attacks, absent the fizzles, so it is slightly more than the standard MMO 1-2-1, but it takes 30 seconds for those few clicks.

My problem might be falling in that age range between playing Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh and having kids who play Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh. Even a few years of playing Magic: the Gathering will not banish the stigma of “what those annoying adolescents were doing just after I stopped being an annoying adolescent.”

: Zubon