In my last post I tentatively compared Blizzard’s announcement of The Wrath of the Lich King, their second expansion, to the post-Velious decline of EverQuest.  Some may smirk and point out that Verant and SOE would have killed for the success of the WoW machine, or that EverQuest running in its eighth year, is hardly dead and far from a failed development model, and those people would be correct and wrong in the same breath…
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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.
.The Guild
I’ve been sitting on this for a couple of weeks (not literally, obviously. That would be difficult. And weird.) and feel it’s time to share if you haven’t already seen it.
Felicia Day is an actress with a problem. (This is already starting to sound like Jerry Springer!) Actually, she doesn’t have a problem (apart from having garnered the attention of the those miniscule minded microbes who use the power of the intertubes to criticise and ridicule others in sentences of less than one syllable) but she has released the extremely amusing first “webisode” of a (hopefully) long-running series called “Watch the Guild” in which she stars as Cyd Sherman, an all-too-true-to-life character that some of you may identify with. Go to the site, watch the video, sign up for notifications and buy stuff. It’s worth it.
Final thoughts: Felicia has since recovered from her addiction to World of Warcraft and recently managed to escape the lure of the bright lights of Blizzcon but the real question is was it a relationship worth saving or leaving behind? Until next time, please take care of yourself and each other.
The Power of Arithmetic
I participated in the Brutal Speed kickoff this weekend. The idea is to make one of a small set of characters that will all work well together, so that team-formation is as easy as “3-5 from pool A, 3-5 from pool B, go.” Pool A is Brutes with area effect damage. Pool B is Corruptors with Kinetics.
It works very nicely, and I took a new character to level 18. People who spent more time playing probably hit 30; I saw 28s as I logged off Sunday. We are expecting some to hit the level cap in about two weeks of hardcore play. This is just normal play, not getting powerleveled by your friends or twinking with outside resources.
One detail is that everyone must take Assault and Tactics, two buff auras from the Leadership pool. Assault increases damage, stacking to +97.5% in the standard team of five Brutes and three Corruptors. Tactics is a to-hit buff, stacking to +65% out of the box and +101.3% once fully slotted. Everyone will do double damage and never miss.
And sweet mother of pearl, it is all starting to come together. As we hit 20, the Corruptors all get Speed Boost, so everyone will be able to attack constantly with no worries about endurance. Because every team will have multiple Speed Boosters, people can skip the Fitness pool and instead take three powers that add More Smash. This could be fun.
: Zubon
Wrath of Mediocrity
I have been in a state of disbelief all weekend…  The rumors of Blizzard’s newest expansion to World of Warcraft were indeed accurate, down to the last bullet point.  Northrend (but we all saw that coming a mile a way), levels 70-80 with new talents and spells, new zones, raised skill cap and…
Wait… ONE new hero-class? ONE profession addition, and no new races!?
Not a single new quest or content addition sub level 70!?!
Completely Unrealistic Estimates
I have referred to “changes that would just take 5 minutes to make” before. There must indeed be cases where the fix really is that simple: I remember one case where the problem was a misplaced decimal point. Most of the time, however, the players saying that have no idea what they are talking about. And the developers want to hit them. If the fix really were that simple, it probably would have been done by now, unless the suggestion is also some stupid balance- or game-breaking idea. No, fixing the AI is not just a matter of telling it not to jump off the cliff. That is a complex behavior to teach it, and teaching cliff-avoidance might break half a dozen other things.
Do feel free to continue browbeating developers for having hard-to-modify spaghetti code. Documentation may seem optional when you need to release in six weeks, but six months after release you may not still have the guy who remembers what half the variables mean. The more flexibility you can build in at the start, the better your reaction time will be later.
: Zubon
Recent Issues
City of Heroes/Villains is having a reactivation weekend, so you can come back and visit if you are interested in seeing the new stuff. Now seems like a good time to pause and reflect on Issue 9 and 10. Issue 9, “Breakthrough,” introduced inventions, the auction house, and some new end-game content. Issue 10, “Invasion,” gave us the Rikti War Zone, late- and end-game content.
This is going to be fairly long, so I am just going to insert the break now.
And so the Djinni said: Three wishes…
Lots of great ideas on my Expansionary Thought thread, and it reflects a wide base of games we play from. With a nod to the authors, let’s take a look at them, where they are coming from, and why.
Expantionary Thought
Just a quick thought/poll to our readers, on the same theme as my last post –
The next expansion has been announced. Tigole calls you up on the phone and says that you’ve been targeted as a Typical Player, and they will add a feature you want. It has to be codable and realistic (‘I want rats to drop Naxx epics” will probably not pass). It cannot turn balance on its ear, and if it is faction based, must be flexible enough to be used by either side.
What do you tell him you want?
A Request to Our Blogroll
If you sell or otherwise lose your URL to one of those “news aggregation” sites that steals everyone’s content and re-posts it, with ads of course, please drop us an e-mail so that we can remove your former site from the blogroll.
Thank you.
WoW: Next Expansion Incoming?
The latest rumblings, coming here on the eve of BlizzCon, is that a new expansion will be announced. It’s silly to think that Blizzard is not planning one, and they have started on it. And, marketing people will agree, the best time to get feedback on your future plans is surrounded by a few thousand of your rabid fans.
Leading the popular charge is Northrend. Specifically “Wrath of the Lich King”. Reasons to this go from the music choices Blizzard has given for their party, which are all dealing with the frosty north, to the new 403 (forbidden) error code the curious have found on a subpage called Wrath on Blizzard’s site and servers.
If so, it will be interesting to see what awaits us. I’m heading off to hang with Mickey in Florida for a few weeks so I’ll miss the party/announcement/spoilers. Someone pick me up a spare Murloc Suit?