March 2005 Entries
Well gang, time for another reminder about what The Outside World sees when they look at our little subculture...
N3rfed: Real life PKs
I tend not to tell Normal People what I spend my spare time doing these days, as they'll initially look blank, then remember the last three news stories about Grand Theft Auto inspired juvenile killings, high-school massacres and really ridiculous court-cases based on the ownership of imaginary junk, (Along with associated ill-informed tabloid editorial) and then sort of look at me nervously, as if I'm about to spontaneously beat them to death.
Sometimes I wish I'd liked Sport when I...
Lesee...one from my excuse for life....must be time for one from The Wacky World of MMORPG News!:
...!
And people say my ideas on Eugenics are Immoral and Wrong...feh. No children without a license! At least some kind of multiple choice test, for crying out loud! For example:
You have successfully bred, and now have to give your spawn a unique account key. Which of the following is least likey to get the crap kicked out of your kid every day at school for eleven years:
A) The name of my Father/Mother/Grandfather/Grandmother.
B) The name of a popular soap star.
C) A Good Solid Bible Name.
D)...
Another rough weekend in Planetside, culumnating in the absolute destruction of any vestiges of self-esteem I may have had by the end of last week. It's a simple logical process to follow:
I play Planetside.
I get 'pwned' repeatedly at Planetside.
I lose any self-respect I may have had.
I hate myself.
I hate Planetside.
I punish myself by making myself play Planetside.
GOTO 10
It's extremely damaging, and very unhealthy, but I can't seem to break the cycle, and hence I'm still there, putting myself through it, night after night. It's a personal psychosis, but I can't help wondering if it's just me, or whether anyone else...
It's another link-post!
Atriarch Is Almost Ready For Alpha Testing
It may not be immediately apparent why I even mention this; what seems to be just another MMORPG In Development, but the curious thing about this one is that it's been In Development for at least five years, and doesn't seem to have folded, or gotten any nearer completion.
It's big thing is Alien Ecosystem. It has no Elfs or Goblins, indeed, no player race that is recognisably 'Human', instead going off on one with a variety of truly alien species. Likewise, the world, cities and dungeons are all xeno-biological, and just plain...
Outstanding! This is why I don't need to follow soap operas on TV:
MMORPG.com Gets Tough
This is fun, not for the specifics of the sites in question; one an Everquest Clone of dubious appeal in a glut of similar other Coming Soon titles, and the other a slightly ad-spam ridden quasi-MMORPG-news-site with a very lucky URL, but for the details of the drama involved. This has it all! Vitriol, flaming, trolls, laughable threats of legal action, accusations of censorship, demands for 'our rights', false identities, anomnity and all the other Good Stuff that makes humans uniquely Evil, and Stupid. "Stuvil", if...
Some news here:
Kill Ten Rats
This is a shame, but I guess if Asheron's Call 2 was actually any good, I'd still be playing it, and so would thousands of others. AC2 seems to have entered that stage in the MMORPG Main Sequence which corresponds to the white dwarf; it is now but a fraction of it's inital size, but will dimly burn for millions and millions of years, slowly losing mass all the while.
It's hard to say exactly what went wrong with it. It's was pretty, presentable, had a fairly solid skill system, interesting world, novel backstory - all the...
Good greif:
Planetside Forum Nerds
So about 13,000 players in an online game killed about 1.4 million people over the space of 30 days, even if that 1.4 million was made up of the former 13,000, many times. So on average, during that month, each player killed 1000 enemies. It seems pretty staggering when you take a step back.
Just for context, around 6 million British Servicemen took part in World War II, and over the five years of the European conflict, 1939-45, 3.3 million German troops died in battle. (Source: Infoplease)
No witty quip...Real war is not something to be made light of,...
From the Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Lum-The-Mad:
News of an Alternative!
Tired of waiting in line and server outages? Then run your own! Obviously, this is seven shades of 'Against The EULA', but the idea is fascinating, none the less. My primary attraction with the genre is the size of the game worlds, and the virtual tourism of it all, so in many ways, a MMORPG in which I'm the only player is not such a bad thing.
It's probably not as simple as it sounds though. Assuming this isn't just a bunch of 'Learn PHP in 21 Days' Optimists, reverse engineering the client will get you...
Gotcha?
Wired News
Well, intentional or not, it seems to have worked. Beware the backlash though...no-one likes to be manipulated, least of all by advertisers. Viral marketing sounds all very clever and buzzwordey, and indeed, is probably associated with words like 'zeitgeist' just about now, but when all is said and done, it is basically 'Crying Wolf'...a method entirely reliant on pretending you're something you're not. Keep this up and no-one will ever believe a blog again!
Ho hum...
Online gaming exists to promote teamplay between people who generally aren't that good at People. Or something. And the best way to do this is to give everyone different, yet complimentary, skills; the traditional 'Group'. Well intentioned stuff, of course, but usually it quickly falls into the standard set of archetypes - the Required and the Tolerated.
The Required: If, when making your avatar, you stuck your pin in the list on one of these, you'll have no troubles. People will always need you, and you can pick and choose your groups. There are three essential types here:
The Tank: ('Meatshield', Warrior,...
In the grand tradition of having not much of interest in my own life to offer:
Something From Stratics
I can just see it:
"So what the hell is so important as to pull me away from my golf?"
"Well, your honor, I think it's something to do with computer games, and comic books.
"Ya say what?"
"Yes...the case is being brought by a company that draw super hero cartoons for kids, you know, Spiderman, Superman, that sort of thing."
"Spider-who?"
"And the defendant runs an internet computer game where kids can pretend to be a super heroes 'on-line'"
"Inter-what?"
"But the prosecution have played the dendendant's computer game and...
The mind boggles:
http://mmodating.com/index.php?page=index
Now I'm rather a jaded person, but this can't possibly work, can it? If you're a real gamer, it becomes touch and go whether you can find the spare time to eat, let alone maintain a mature, long-term relationship with a normal human being. (See link to 'Everquest Daily Grind' below.) Two gamers might have more luck perhaps, provided they play the same game, and are of approximate the same level, but this certainly doesn't qualify as a 'relationship' in the conventional sense.
But certainly I can see it might have a great deal of appeal for the younger...
So like, I’m in the Crypt of Betrayal, having a go at ‘AQ4’... one of the core armour quests for the dapper level 20-30 adventurer about town. There are six of these, resulting in one piece of uber armour for each body location, ensuring that I never need to go and try buying player-made armour from any money-grabbing player-crafter.
This is handy, as not being able to go afk-merchant myself for long periods of time, and not having any phat lewts of my own to pimp out, I generally can’t afford to buy anything useful made by other players, and so...
Heres some news!
Wookietastic
I expect this is an occassion for great excitement for People Who Like Star Wars, and more specifically, People Who Think Wookies Are Cool. Personally I always thought Star Wars could have done just as well without Chewbacca (who was generally outclassed and outacted by a midget in a wheeley bin with no lines at all), and certainly Episode III could do without an Army of Wookies, which at present, seems to be the big selling point for the film. "Come see! We have not one Chewbacca, but many!" Feh.
As for Galaxies, well, this expansion is clearly a...
One thing about the Internet, and Online Gaming, is that it's by and large, a silent medium. Conversations, and indeed, entire relationships, are conducted without hearing the voice of the other party. There are exceptions; Teamspeak, Ventrillo and the like, but in most people's eyes, you are what you type.
I kind of like this actually - I count myself both literate and fluent with a keyboard - I'm not sure what 'wpm' I am, but long practice trying to communicate ideas in text, at the speed of a normal conversation, has meant that I've developed fairly fast, and more importantly,...
Found a useful reference for those interested in the minutae of MMORPGs:
http://www.mmogchart.com/
Chap there seems at least as obsessed as me, but far more dedicated and methodical. Points of interest include:
Honeymooners: Almost all of the games seem to soar on launch, then fall off to about a half to a third of peak population, within two months. I can relate to this...the 'oooooh' factor rarely lasts.
Always a Bigger Fish: Despite World of Warcraft being as popular as it is, over half of all MMORPG subscriptions are still accounted for by Lineage and Lineage II; monster hits in the Far East, with...
I think I've worked out why practically all MMORPGs go out unfinished, broken, or just plain rubbish:
http://www.stratics.com/#newsitem1109658357,77971,
and
http://www.stratics.com/#newsitem1109444369,50945,
Maybe I'm being a bit simple, but surely beta testing software is grueling, difficult and skilled technical work, and therefore, probably best not given out as some kind of reward, or lottery prize to ignorant muppets? I'd love to see what kind of beta testing feedback these developers actually recieve, if any.
But I've done a bit of software testing, on a professional level, and it's certainly no game...