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.
.We all know why you play online games: you want to get laid. No pickup line works quite the way “my Shaman has his epic mount” does. I sometimes lie and claim to have a level 60 Priest so I can meet women in bars. It’s true: everyone is looking for high level Priests.
: Zubon
Three of the KTR staff are leaving us for greener pastures and I’d like to wish them well on their quest. They are also welcome back at any time down the road should they desire to pick up the KTR flag again.
Safe travels to lufia22, ringthree and Zxyrox! I have enjoyed working with you guys and please stay in touch. Again, if you ever want to return just let me know.
Their contributions will not be forgotten.
– Ethic
To me, the question of people spending real life money on in-game things has been this: why are people paying not to play your game? What is your wrong with your game such that people would rather spend time at work than put in the hours in-game to accomplish whatever they are buying?
Pause for a moment and consider what an indict of a game RMT is: someone will pay hundreds of real life dollars to skip large chunks of your content. If this were just an eccentric few with odd tastes, that would be one thing, but there are thousands and thousands of accounts involved.
Epicurus teaches us that desire is suffering. The nature of any desire is a sort of pain that we seek to resolve. We are conscious of lacking something, whether that be air, food, or a level-capped character. In filling that need, we receive pleasure. We can also achieve pleasure by contemplating past pleasures, notably being pleased about the desires that are fulfilled.
When you buy a new game/level-treadmill, you are buying both a new desire and a way to fulfill it. Before you started playing, you had no need of a level 60 Shaman. Once you started playing, you felt the need to level. Now you have a level-capped character with perfect raiding gear, and you can contemplate how leet you are. When that contemplation loses its satisfaction, you can always create a new level 1, a new source of desire to level, a new pool to fill.
Please forgive a somewhat stream of consciousness philosophical discussion.
Over at my book blog, I have posted a review of Permutation City, a book that seems to be out of print. I will assume you haven’t read it, and I will avoid spoilers in case you want to find a copy. For what it’s worth, I rated it “3: worth reading once (check it out from a library).”
The main focus of the book is on uploads, or “Copies” as they are called there. You upload a scanned copy of your brain onto a computer, thereby having a backup in case you die. When you fire up your Copy, there is a version of you that exists on a computer. I want to focus on a single thing, the character of Peer and how he goes about being happy, since it applies to what we talk about here. Peer joyously instantiates the purest form of the grind.
[City of Villains] Issue 7 seems to have some of the best CoX content to date, judging by comments from the test server. All the comments I have made about Striga Isle and thematically flavorful contacts are borne out in spades.
The new contacts include your signature archvillains with their brands of infamy, a mad scientist to improve on Doc Buzzsaw, a personal sort of evil in the mold of Peter Themari, a strike force against the Freedom Phalanx and Vindicators, and a mission with a hand-designed team of hero bosses. (Sorry if those names are unfamiliar to folks who have not played CoV.)
[EverQuest II] On June 5, 6, and 7 the Red Sox will be playing the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. During this same time an evil Curt Schilling will be found in EverQuest II (Schilling’s favorite game apparently). Everytime evil Curt Schilling is taken down, a $5 donation will be made to charity. I don’t play EQ2 and I don’t particulary like the Yankees or Red Sox, but the cause is right.
[Click here for more info on how you too can defeat Curt Schilling.]
[World of Warcraft] It didn’t take but a little over a week for the newly formed guild I joined to break up. Poor attendance and a hasty guild master ended it. I’m actually quite sad because I liked the group of people. It was fun raiding with them and learning the stuff, we just didn’t seem to be too terribly good at it. I personally don’t blame the attendance. We didn’t have a regular guild schedule making it hard for people who weren’t in the last raid or logged in daily to check the guild message to know about the next raid.
The guild master decided to make characters on another server on Alliance side and asked us to come with him. A few of us did, including me, mostly because I consider these people my friends now and it’s fun to play with them. Despite this, it’s nothing but an alt to me. I did manage to get into another raiding guild after being recommended from the disbanded guild. This guild is currently up to Hakkar in ZG and Domo in MC, so it’s a pretty new guild, which I’m excited about.
MMO community managers have an ugly job. Public relations is never the cakewalk that it seems from the outside, but dealing with the teeming internet hordes is not always as pleasant as eating bees.
I have never had the job, but let us pause a moment to consider some of the things we put our poor community managers, board mods, and developers through. Anyone can feel free to add horrors that I have missed in the comments (or via e-mail). (If this is your job, we understand if you feel the need to use a pseudonym and censor specifics, but we will not be releasing IP addresses and we understand that any example does not relate to specific people, but rather is a statement of general tendencies or extreme cases, probably exaggerated for effect. Or maybe you want to make an example of someone.)
I just realized it has been two years since I started this site. Two years. I’m honestly shocked. I had my first year at Blogger.com and then I moved to my own place (where 7 other people signed up to write). It’s been another whole year now since the move.
I figured it might be a good time to take a look at some stats because numbers are fun, OK?
In the last year we have had 285,661 people visit the site. In that same time there were 1,251,296 hits. And for data we transferred 13,290,855 KBytes. In the last month, we averaged 1,323 visitors per day.
Now, I don’t know what all these numbers mean, but they look big enough to me. I’m just glad my hosting fees have not gone up.
Thanks to everyone that spends a little time here and I hope we have provided a little entertainment for you. Here’s looking to two more years!
– Ethic