Kill Ten Rats

lolcattery is a strong indicator that there has never been a better time in human history to be alive. Sending a message around the world used to take months rather than moments, and being illiterate did not matter much when you might encounter two books in your life. Now information and energy are so cheap that we use a global communications system to circulate captioned pictures of cats with odd grammar and spelling. We have so much free time that this has spawned a lolcode programming language, and serious professors of linguistics consider lolcats.

Your needs are so easily satisfied that you can spend a considerable amount of time pretending to be a digital elf. This blog is effectively a meta-discussion of being digital elves, and it is available to you for free in your home with frequent updates. You can delve into irrelevant crap like fake online lesbians or whether two imaginary spaceships pretended to bump into one another. You cook make-believe food in-game while eating a pizza you had delivered to your home.

Admit it, modern life is a pretty sweet deal. If you get a chance, you might toss a few dollars to folks in countries where information is still rare and expensive.

: Zubon

Have you ever wanted to write about MOGs but didn’t want to bother with hosting a website? If so, we are looking for a few more people to join the ranks here at KTR. If you are interested in learning more about this volunteer opportunity, send me an email.

Update: Response was huge, thanks to everyone that is interested. I’m going to pick a handful of those that have sent me an email. If you are still interested and have not yet sent me an email, it’s not too late to be considered.

– Ethic

Even if it is just across town, moving sucks. Royally.

//long rant about moving, cable installation, utilities transfer, etc. etc.//

Shwew. Almost as bad as trying to move a large guild from one MOG to another or herding cats. Anyway, I’m getting settled now. I’ll post something interesting here soon.

An MMMOGIG is not a game, even though it might sound like some new twist on the MMO. What is it then? Well, it stands for Minnesota Massively Multiplayer Online Game Interest Group. I just got back from our first official meeting and I must say it was a really terrific time. To be in a room full of people that share your passion for these games is great, certainly when you have been so used to people not even knowing what an MMO is in the first place. I’m not going to go into too much detail as it has already been covered pretty well. If you are near Minneapolis at all and have an interest in MMOs, I strongly encourage you to join our meetup.com group and attend the next meeting. We had at least one out-of-state visitor (Zonk from Slashdot and MMOG Nation) tonight and he made a 4-hour drive to attend.

What I will say is very simple: This group is very passionate about MMOs and yet what we are all looking for in future games is quite varied. If you can make an MMO that can satisfy every gamer in the room, you will be very rich.

It was great to meet everyone tonight and I look forward the the next meeting.

– Ethic

Hexedian posted this in our forums and it is a good topic so I wanted to bring attention to it:

I’ve been thinking for while, and I’ve come to the conclusion that most MMORPGs that we see today are simply too easy. Not that the time to acquire power is too short, I don’t mind that either way, but understanding an MMORPG, and playing it to near perfection, requires next to no skills from the player.

Now, that may seem intuitive for the people who are used to being made fun of because they play a game that doesn’t require skills, but one has to understand that it doesn’t have to be that way. MMORPGs can be every bit as challenging as the next shooter or platformer, without necessarily asking the player to time rocket jumps to the perfection. Why, one of the best catalysts of skillful gaming, human opponents, is, by definition of massively multiplayer, already common in large quantities. The only thing required, then, for skills to play a more interesting part, is for players to be able to make a difference in the game that doesn’t come from having bigger numbers next to their name, or simply more zerglings to attack with.

So, I’m wondering (And obviously trying to start a conversation), has any fellow rat-slayer had any idea of how to make MMORPGs more interesting skill-wise?

Continue reading MMORPGs Are Too Easy

Returning to a topic I started a while ago, am I on the cutting edge, or am I recommending that MMO companies commit suicide? There are several games that have tried some form of robust housing and city building/defense system, and almost all of them have been disappointing.

Asheron’s Call was the weakest performer of its crop of games, and its sequel did worse. A Tale in the Desert and Wurm Online are niche games. Shadowbane and Horizons have a recurring feature at GU Comics called “the Bug Zapper,” and Horizons still beats Vanguard as a model of how not to make a game. Star Wars Galaxies … yeah. Wish never went live. EVE Online is the lone winner of the pack, although didn’t it hit 100,000 subscribers before it added player-owned outposts and starbases? Age of Conan is the next test case, although its high violence and gore quotient may affect its results.

Is this just an apocalyptically bad idea? Perhaps the technology was not there in the past, but it is now becoming viable, like voice chat? It is not the sort of thing you can easily add to an existing game. You cannot just paste some cities on the side and call it good; that is meaningless. Where would you put it in Azeroth or Middle Earth? Shadowbane built around the idea, and it fit EVE’s existing structure perfectly. I know I am not the core MMO audience, since I do not play WoW, but am I completely in left field here?

: Zubon