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Contest Winner

The contest is over, the random drawing has been held. “Lachek” from Ontario Canada is the winner of a signed copy of MMO Evolution. The book was donated by the author, our own Nicodemus aka Robert Rice. Congratulations!

– Ethic

WoW Expansion and Retention

Our dear friend Tobold has an interesting post about WoW’s subscriber numbers surrounding the expansion. WoW repeats the same pattern of other games, just on a grander scale:

So the decline doesn’t matter? Far from that. We will never know the exact numbers, but the WarcraftRealms graph suggests a 10% decline from the peak in February. That still leaves more players than WoW had in December last year. But if you happen to work in a company, imagine you having to tell your bosses that you just lost 10% of your customers, starting the first decline after 27 months of growth. Big as WoW is, losing 10% means losing more people than Everquest ever had, and it also means losing over 100 million dollars.

ATSRTWT
: Zubon

Back in the Saddle

After a very brief stint guild-less, Abryn and I joined up with a newly formed raid guild, comprised of some old friends, and individuals representing most of the uber guilds of our server’s history. Focus was formed with two objectives; to have fun, and push the bleeding edge of progression raid content.

The question is, is it really possible to accomplish both?

Continue reading Back in the Saddle

Global Names

coh[City of Heroes] Since I got the question, I am going to explain an excellent City of Heroes/Villains system that every game should steal. Every account gets a global name, one that is unique across all servers. In-game you would refer to it starting with an “@” so I am @Zubon. This has several uses.

  • Global tells: even if you are playing a villain on Justice while I am playing a hero on Pinnacle, you can reach me with: “/tell @Zubon” If I am not currently online, it will save the message for the next time I am online.
  • Global friends: if you accept someone as a global friend (/gfriend @name), you will be able to see what characters each other are on, including server, zone, origin, archetype, level, and current team size. You can suppress this with /ghide.
  • Global chat: you can set up chat channels that people can join (with whatever permissions you want) from any server. You can have five channels running at once.

No matter where I am or what I am doing, I can find my friends.

: Zubon

Global Frequency

coh[City of Heroes] Much of City of Heroes happens in instances. There are a few zones where people hang about outside for various reasons, mostly the auction houses these days, but the missions are instances so we spend most of our time in no particular zone. You could spam broadcast all day long and irritate only a few people at a time. This makes Paragon City feel pretty empty for many new players once they leave the newbie zone.

Instead, we use the global chat system to communicate. That and supergroup/coalition chat, but we use a global channel as the de facto guild chat because at any given time someone might be in an alt supergroup, on the other side of the hero/villain divide, or playing on another server. The same idea makes global channels (multi-)server-wide general chat, reaching people in instances and all zones.

But if you don’t know the server’s favorite channels are, you are still in silence. When I visit another server, I am still listening to the chatter from back home. Let’s help each other out here: what is your server’s most popular global chat channel(s), and what is/are it/they used for? On Pinnacle, for example, we mostly use PinnacleBadges, for general chat as well as sharing badge hunting/missions; using it to look for a normal group is usually considered poor manners, but looking for task force members is perfectly fine. Off-topic chat is extensive.

With any luck, the comments here will be a useful resource for players trying to find the community across the servers.

: Zubon

Is Diablo an MMO?

I’d like to take a look at the past for a moment here. There are a lot of rumors of a Diablo 3 being announced soon, benefitting from the new and improved features coming to Battle.net with StarCraft 2. Details on those features have yet to surface, so all we have is conjecture. But what about the classic title, Diablo 2? Is it an MMO? Continue reading Is Diablo an MMO?

Sex!

Did I get your attention? Good.

Unfortunately, you’ve been had. This isn’t about sex. Or rather, this is not all about sex – I’m not that Freudian. This is about raising the discourse, in a way. Improving these games we play. Enriching the narrative.

The question is simple: Why is it that the vast majority of the games we play, and have played, are so thematically shallow? It seems to me that, sure, of course, games must have a clear mandate to entertain. There’s no escaping that, and it’s as it should be. But, should that be all? Here we have this medium, one of the most versatile ever created, but somehow we can’t seem to be able to look past its mere entertainment value. We do nothing else with it. What can we do with this, and why are we not doing it?

Continue reading Sex!