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Housing Glut?

housesI wish. Take a look at the screen shot and you’ll see how Turbine messed up housing (I know you are all shocked). This is a listing of the available neighborhoods. The first column is standard houses, the second is deluxe houses and the third is Kinship housing. I can only afford a standard house. See all those zeros in the first column? The only two houses that are still available are the same house lot and I don’t like it (it would seem nobody else does either). I’ve got a list of 5 or 6 houses that would be nice to have, but until the deluxe and Kinship houses start selling, I shall remain homeless because they will not open a new instance until the old ones sell (clarification: ALL the houses do not need to sell before they open new neighborhoods. I’m not sure what method they use, but that is not it). I don’t understand why they thought it was wise to put that many Kinship houses in each neighborhood.

Still, the neighborhoods are very well done and it’s fun to run around in them. I just wish they would have put them closer to a real town. Also, the fact they put farmland and a town center in each neighborhood means they are seriously considering adding crafting abilities to them, which would be a Very Bad Idea.

– Ethic

Character Contemplations 2: Zubon (Empathy/Electricity Blast Defender)

Healer for HireIn every game, I have a healer named Zubon. Empathy is the classic healing set in City of Heroes, so Zubon is an empath. I went with electricity because it comes with endurance drain: an enemy who cannot activate his attacks cannot hurt anyone.

The life of a Defender is interesting. As with most healers, everyone wants to have them on the team, but no one wants to be them. As an actual healer, an empath is in great demand amongst people trained on other MMOs. Solo ability is low, but he brings a lot to a team.

Continue reading Character Contemplations 2: Zubon (Empathy/Electricity Blast Defender)

In the Valley, Fer Sure

So, having wrapped up my affairs in Middle Earth, I’ve returned when possible to Azeroth. Sadly, my life schedule continues to allow me little time for playing, but two forced weeks of staying at home let me get into it fairly deeply. I’ve always been more of a social player, and so returning to guildmates and friends was nice. I managed to run the Headless Horseman event a few hundred times to ensure everyone had what they needed (sans a pet for me, or any guildmate *sigh), but what I’ve been doing mostly is PvP, specifically, Alterac Valley by the truckload. Because that’s where honor grinders come when honor grinding is needed. I’ll explain that in a minute, but the wierd part is I’m actually enjoying it.

Ya, I know, right?

Continue reading In the Valley, Fer Sure

Nancy Drew more popular than WoW; EA doesn’t know what a PC is

I have a theory about game industry execs…most of them are pretty dumb. Sure, I’ve met a lot of really smart guys that “get it” and are just totally awesome. There are a few that I look up to and I try to follow their example in business, design, etc. But there are so many idiots out there that have either gotten their position by dumb luck, the ideas and work of others, or simply being in the right place at the right time, that the joke about the stereotype is actually pretty right on the mark in a lot of cases.

This is pretty self-evident in the industry. How many times have you seen a press release that has left you scratching your head and thinking “wtf?”. This usually happens when someone cancels a project or title that everyone is just dying for, or some stupid concept is greenlighted and given an outrageous budget, and the list goes on.

But I digress, lets talk about Nancy Drew for a moment, and then on to EA.
Continue reading Nancy Drew more popular than WoW; EA doesn’t know what a PC is

EVE Online – Security Breached

EVE Online had some unexplained downtime last weekend. Now it has been explained:

…we discovered an anomaly in the EVE Online Database indicating a potential exploit. Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 12:57 that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely dark while an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure was executed.

What we discovered was an indication that one of our databases was being accessed through a security breach…

Read the rest here. CCP sure gets their share of controversy.

– Ethic

Trick or Treat III

Since we like holiday events, I thought I would mention that City of Heroes/Villains starts its third Halloween event today. In addition to last year‘s features, you can also get temporary powers that make you look like any of 33 enemies (well worn territory in other games, I know). Event info here.

I like that City of Heroes has cumulative holiday events. If you missed last year’s, they recycle that code in addition to adding this year’s. And I stand by last year’s statement that trick-or-treat is the Platonic ideal of the grind. 1/minute: click, monsters appear, crush; repeat, badge.

: Zubon

Holidays

One feature I have always enjoyed about online games ever since my first MMO, Earth & Beyond, are the live holiday events. Back on E&B, the Halloween event consisted of receiving special pumpkin-launching cannons for your ship, resulting in the areas around space stations becoming large messes of splattered pumpkin bits. These days I play WoW, and it looks like Blizzard is getting better at its holiday events.

WoW has seen two back-to-back holidays in recent weeks. First up was the all-new event, Brewfest. Themed to match the real-world equivalent, Beerfest, Brewfest included some hilarious moments. In the Brewfest main event areas outside Ironforge and Orgrimmar, tents and vendors were all set up, offering quests and, of course, alcoholic beverages to keep your character wasted. Music in this area consisted of an upbeat fanfare overlaid with either Dwarves or Goblins, depending on where you were, getting drunk and joking around like madmen. One of the funniest moments I found was on the Horde side, where the Goblins were making a mockery of the Dwarven version of the event by wearing horribly cheesy Dwarf masks and calling themselves by Dwarven names.

Continue reading Holidays

You Online

Via Jonas Lamis at the Singularity Institute blog, Adam Sarner issues some predictions on life going virtual and how your personal online agent will help you interact with a virtual world.

If you are not familiar with the idea of what he calls a “persona bot,” think of it as a virtual mini-you. You tell it what sort of filters to apply to the world, and it finds things that you want to see. You already have much of that functionality in parts: spam filters get rid of e-mail you do not want, ad blockers remove ads you do not want, feeds bring you blog messages you do want, Amazon recommends other books or movies you might like, Google Alerts runs searches for you automatically. There are dozens of competing sites that want to help you find the next thing that might interest you based on your current preferences. Combine all that into one virtual agent who gives you an info dump when you check in; if it makes mistakes, tell it what to do differently.

This sort of thing reminds me that everyone needs to read Permutation City, and I need to read more Greg Egan generally. If you have other citations to contemplations of our virtual future, comments are open.

: Zubon