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Guild Wars – Not Really An Article

Gaile Gray, ArenaNet employee extraordinaire, stole a soapbox to stand on at the Guild Wars Wiki in order to explain why they ban 1000 (!) Guild Wars accounts per week for real money transactions (RMT).

Say the RMTer talks to 10 or 20 people in a day, and waves 100K gold or XX Ectos or a rare miniature in front of them. Some of those people “take the bait,” and then the RMTer tells the player some song and dance about how, to prevent them getting caught for the transaction, the company will “place the gold directly on the player’s account.” Most people reading this will say, “Yeah, sure they will!” and laugh, but surprisingly enough, some players believe it, and they turn over their account credentials. 

While I personally believe that most MMO blog readers (especially the highly intelligent Kill Ten Rats readers) “wouldn’t fall for that trick,”  it is amazing that this problem is so widespread.  Gaile has a great point that I usually forget to take in to consideration when thinking about the gold farming business: the phisher is doing this all day long.  Statistically, they will find that one born every minute.  Anyway, in the hopes of helping a little public service announcement I thought I might pass that on.

In other news, it seems the that the ArenaNet Community Team had a two week break for the holidays.  Could this be because they won’t be getting another long break for awhile due to upcoming projects?  Hopefully that flood wall breaks soon enough.

–Ravious
…and his Desert Eagle .50

The Gravel Pit

Turbine was going in such a great direction with Mines of Moria until the Waterworks.  Whoever designed the last of the quest chains in this region must have missed the memo on the design change from Shadows of Angmar to Mines of Moria. 

It started out great.  The content was stacked, and made sense storywise.  I was killing glass spiders to harvest their legs for crystal lamp repairs, checking out the hypnotoads, and the area itself was a breath of fresh air for the lack of vertically separate areas.  Then I got to the Great Wheel in the Waterworks. 

Continue reading The Gravel Pit

From a Business Perspective

Your MMO is not a success based on how many players you have, whether they supply enough revenue to keep the servers running, or even if you turn a profit. If I can get a better rate of return investing in Blizzard and its parent company, I have no reason to invest in your game. I have no idea which MMO company has the best rate of return (Three Rings?), but that is your investors’ target. This is why games shut down even when they are still showing a profit: you can use those resources elsewhere and make more money. Or not, because there are a lot of short-sighted executives out there, but the cynics are consistently beating the gamers who keep hoping the next game will be the New New Thing. An investor may turn his nose up at what a gamer considers a win.

And that is limiting the view to the industry. Anyone care to guess what the return on investment is for a good casual game? How many non-WoW MMOs out-sold the latest Nancy Drew adventure this holiday season?

: Zubon

Update: will it help us avoid distractions if I rephrase as “ROI * risk” and/or “ROI over time”?

Peggle Extreme

In an inspired bit of marketing, there is a free Peggle demo available on Steam: Peggle Extreme. It is not this extreme, but it mixes Peggle and Valve graphics. Unicorn with head crab? Check. Skateboarding beaver on fire? Check. GLaDOS telling you how well you are doing? Check.

And the full version is five bucks this week.

: Zubon

Guild Wars 2 Crumbs Follow-Up

Regina Buenaobra, one of ArenaNet’s Community Managers, took some time to clarify an ethereal post I wrote about the crumbs of Guild Wars 2 information found in the stockholder’s conference call.

The Kill Ten Rats / Massively posts make it appear as if NCsoft has a lot of direction over our marketing strategy, when this isn’t the case at all. The GW2 marketing strategy is determined by ArenaNet, not by NCsoft. The formation of NCsoft West ensures that all studios owned by NCsoft have the freedom to determine their own marketing strategies, in fitting with what they think is best for the games that they develop. NCsoft developed Aion, therefore NCsoft is determining Aion’s marketing strategy. What ArenaNet decides to do with GW2 is independent of what NCsoft wants to do with Aion.

I find the clarification heartening, but for a different reason than the obvious.  To be honest, I have lost a lot of faith in NCSoft.  After Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa makes strike two, but my problem is not the death of the games.  Rather, it is how they lived and died.  I do not think either should have been a part of the $15 flatline from the start, and I definitely think that there were other options than shutdown.  Options that may have retained more consumer confidence, perhaps.

So, I remain in this fearful dichotomy of my favorite developer being corrupted by its Korean overlord.  Regina brings a kind of salve to this fear.   Especially if ArenaNet is further layered away from shareholders by NCWest.  Now, back to writing more so-called articles.

–Ravious
…a reasonable amount of trouble.