.

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.

.

Plagueworlds

According to the BBC, scientists are suggesting that the outbreak of a deadly virtual disease might give an insight into the outbreak of epidemics in the real world. In particular, they are invesitgating player reactions to the “Corrupted Blood” plague that took place a couple of years ago.

Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour. The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game.”

So, next time your partner/parent/child/employer asks how you can be spending so much time playing a stupid game, tell them you’re taking part in a medical experiment.

Three-Sentence Game Reviews

If I am not playing City of Heroes, what have I been playing? A variety of games that each provide a few hours of entertainment. They are not necessarily bad games, just small ones. They might have a neat mechanic, a good idea, or interesting graphics.

The downside of them is usually the pricing issue. A free demo provides about an hour of entertainment, or you can buy all three hours of entertainment for $20. Given the competition, that is not a great pricing model. You can, of course, trade with your friends after you have had your fill.

So let’s flip through some games.

Continue reading Three-Sentence Game Reviews

Everybody dies

If you haven’t played DEFCON yet, you probably should. Can’t go wrong with a 60 megs demo and it’s tons of fun. Well, if you’re into genocide it’s fun (and who isn’t?). It’s from Introversion, the kind folks that made the also quite delicious Uplink a few years back.

If you like it, send them a few bucks. Support basement programming, save the whales, all that.

Let Us Play, Blizzard!

Yesterday I talked about how some friends and I on different servers who wanted to PvP together have had to level characters to 19 on a new server to do so. What’s more, we’re unlikely to ever level together far enough to play AV or Arena.

I suspect I’m not the first person to make the following suggestions. I suspect I’m probably more like the (hundred?) thousandth. But humor me… can someone explain to me why Blizzard erects such huge barriers to PvP participation?

If it were up to me, I’d tweak WoW PvP as follows:

Continue reading Let Us Play, Blizzard!

Heard in Game

Someone was explaining that his new “$5k lol” computer had “duel video cards and cpu.” Comment in global chat: “someone who can’t spell dual properly doesn’t deserve a friggen $5000 PC.”

Response: “hah it was actually spelled properly just not in the right context”
Also: “since when did mmo become grammer class”

The discussion went downhill from there. Being an MMO, people were more irritated with the grammar police than the mostly literate.

: Zubon

If You Crush Your Enemy’s Skull and Nobody is Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound?

Some friends and I recently decided to do some battlegrounds together. Not being on the same servers, we had to create newbies and do the grind to 19. We’ll probably be stuck with WSG, and AV (much less Arena) is pretty much out of the question for us.

Anyway, this drove me to try out the Fury beta recently. Fury is getting a fair dose of hype as an upcoming fantasy MMO focusing exclusively on PvP. You’ve got standard PvP scenarios — free-for-all, team deathmatch, and CTF, with third-person WoW-style fantasy combat. There is not a persistent world, but there is persistent character advancement with skill trees you advance in to customize your character. Battleground-style PvP without the grind! Sounds great, right?

I was surprised that I got bored of it fairly quickly, and it wasn’t until I was writing this that I realized why: Fury isn’t an MMO at all.

Continue reading If You Crush Your Enemy’s Skull and Nobody is Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound?

Parting Shot on Issue 10

What is with having the Clockwork King in a level 50 task force? The Clockwork go away at level 20, when you defeat the Clockwork King at the end of Synapse’s task force. It makes perfect sense for him to come for Penny, but not as a level 50.

The Psychic Clockwork King everyone knows and loves is from another dimension where he realized his full potential. That is not our Clockwork King; he lost. I think someone missed that when writing the task force. Also, if he achieves his full potential, he conquers the world and wipes out the human race. I guess we can look forward to that.

They play with portals a lot in the task force, but that explanation does not work because this is not a trans-dimensional Clockwork King entering via portal. This is our Clockwork King, and he kicks in the door. After having leveled 30 times while no one was looking.

Maybe he paid for powerleveling.

: Zubon

Social Gamers? No way!

This article:  

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15114 

seems to point out what a lot of us at Kill Ten Rats have known for years, but it’s an interesting read. It would seem psychologists are finally realizing that these MMO games are social activities and, in some cases, can cause a person to become better at social interactions.  This is not to say that it holds true for every gamer.  Certainly there are plenty of MMO players who it seems will never learn how to behave around others. What I find most interesting are the romantic facts.   The study found that 1 in 10 MMO players develop physical relationships with those they have met in the game world.  I’d be interested in seeing how that compares to the success rate on matchmaking websites.

Tired of Rikti

My City of Heroes account expired last week. I have not renewed it yet. I seem to enjoy continuous rock ’em sock ’em action for about ten weeks before needing a break. Alas, more unsubscribed time will lie between me and my decorative pet. This, along with my badge-whoring, is why I have half as many level-capped characters as my guildmates.

Issue 10 failed to bring much new in terms of gameplay. New story arcs are interesting, but they do not play differently from the old ones. The parts that are new are annoying: more enemies with crowd control, rescue hostage pets who attack at random for little damage. The task force has some interesting new thoughts, namely mini-Hami and the Four Horsemen (new in terms of gameplay; every game has some kind of Four Horsemen). Most of the new content can be consumed quickly: do a lap of the revamped zone (where safe), check out the new art, see the new archvillains.

New things yet to do: fight the Vanguard; finish the Vanguard story arcs (or read the mission text somewhere); play more hero-villain cooperative teams; 2 badges for doing that raid 25 times.

I am rediscovering how little fun the Rikti are to fight. I mostly play squishy characters, and the Rikti have plenty of crowd control, particularly the revamped Rikti Magi. Their drones counter stealth, and they have enough psychic and toxic damage to annoy tanks. I was excited to see the game getting back to the original story, but the main benefit of fighting them is that Communications Officers summon Portals for big experience.

: Zubon