Creativity can be deadly

I realized today that I have no clue whatsoever what the term “MMO” means anymore. I gave it some thought and came up with “An MMO is an online, real-time game where other people affect can your game.” That’s pretty vague. Clearly there are games which call themselves MMOs and can be played as if they were MMOs, or as if they were solo RPGs. I don’t know. I just know the old definitions don’t work.

Take World of Warcraft and the current flavor of the month, Tiny Speck’s Glitch. One is the most popular MMO in the world (well, if you don’t include World of Tanks, though the developer does). The other is a super casual browser-based game where you can’t even kill stuff. The two games share almost no features, yet both are MMOs. I give up. If you can play your game and can see another player when you do so, it’s a MMO.

Which is going to make writing these Daily Blogrolls SO EASY. Checkers? Is it online? MMO.

The blogging world has changed quite a lot since the last time I was doing these (and work crushed my free time). People are leaving drops of content all over the Internet, on Tumblr blogs, on Google+, on Twitter. I’ll still be pointing out great posts by the bloggers in my blogroll, but I’ll be trying to collect some of these other far-flung bits of wisdom as well.

Before I get started, an update on my MMO gaming: DDO on Sunday nights, D&D fourth edition on Thursday nights, and Glitch. Driver issues have killed EQ2 — I can’t play it. I’ve been poking around in Rift. I’ve started working on the Saint’s Haven quests in Dragon Nest. Mostly Glitch for MMOs, though.

Beau Turkey has done a heck of a write-up on Glitch, btw.

Fighting giants in DAoC beta

It’s been ten years since Dark Age of Camelot went live? Wow. I remember calling it “EQ Lite” based solely on the screenshots they released in the early rounds of beta. When I got into the beta myself, I realized just how impressive an achievement the game was. Yes, it clearly had been influenced by EverQuest, but it was its own game and would become one of the influences that would form the mechanics behind World of Warcraft.

It would be physically impossible for anyone to spend more time in a game than I spent in DAoC. Scott Jennings, Mythic’s one time DBA, has a wonderful post from Matt Firor, DAoC’s original producer, one what it was like to ship an MMO before the market was crowded with hundreds of them.

It was a different world.

Star Corsairs

After taking the world by storm with his sandbox browser MMO Golemizer, indie MMO dev Dave Toulouse is set to unleash his second game, Star Corsairs. It’s an updated take on the old space exploration / trading games of the 80s (most notably SunDog) combined with the mining, ship construction and PvP of EVE Online. And maybe a smidgen of Star Castle. Explore, take on missions to protect the Federation, construct your own starship, blow stuff up, free to play. I’ll have more on Star Corsairs when I’ve played it more.

Donate, and he’ll name a star after you.

Speaking of indie MMO development, Andorov posted an excellent list of 15 important steps to wild success in indie MMO development.

Rule 4: Create a good company and MMO name. Recruiting for Joe Schmoe’s Awesome MMORPG is going to be a lot more difficult than Excelsior Games’ Islandia: The Re-Islanding. Most non-visionaries (which I may also refer to as dumb f**ks or DFs), though talented, are simple folk and easily impressed.

Lucent Heart, the “zodiac-inspired” dating MMO, not content with merely connecting up guys playing guys and guys playing scantily-clad girls, is about to unleash dance battles upon the world, says Anjel Syndicate.

Create your dance from dozens of dance steps, re-create music videos, and .. well, if a collection of Minstrels can do System of a Down in LotRO, I suppose a bunch of angel-winged schoolgirls can do Thriller in Lucent Heart!

See ya tomorrow!

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A whole weekend lost in a Rift, but I think what I’ll remember most about this last weekend was this jerk in General chat — named, ironically, Karana — who was going on and on about how the quests and everything else about the game was a copy of WoW.

Well, heck, I didn’t know Thomas Edison was resurrected just to offer his genius insights. But some people just can’t see past their own experiences with WoW. Like, the people complaining that every one of the classes will have a 50/16/0 point spec, as if the class-defining abilities of each ‘soul’ only happen once 50 points are spent on it, similar to WoW’s talent trees. ACTUALLY, the class-defining skill is usually given for free, at zero points. Smart players will have a synergistic three soul mix. Anyway, already went on about that, and though I’m loving Rift and have applied to a guild, I’m really tired of reading about it.

Well, let’s see if there’s some stories from the weekend that aren’t about Rift, shall we?

Star Trek Online

Just second to the Foundry in Star Trek Online’s most anticipated feature list is the return, this weekend, of the weekly Featured Episodes. The first arc dealt with the icy Breen, the villains of the Dominion War that razed Earth. That was followed by the battle against the vampiric Devidians. This third arc starts with Romulan trouble. With hints of a connection to earlier episodes, does this continue the deadly marriage of Romulan and Borg technology? We’ll find out Saturday. Thanks to Blue Kae for the heads-up!

DC Universe Online

With today’s launch of SOE’s PC/console superhero MMO tearing up the interwebs, Slurms of Multiplaying had a quick poll to gauge the excitement. Sounds like SOE should have given the title a little more publicity. Though with it plastered over every gaming site, I have o idea how anyone could not have known it was launching…

Champions Online

On the very day that superhero rumbler DC Universe Online launches, Cryptic announces that their own cape-and-spandex offering, Champions Online, will go cash shop powered on the 27th of this month. I find the two games very similar in feel, but only one of them is playable on the PS3.

Anjin of Bullet Points goes into some detail on what you will and will not get for your free play in Champions Online.

Dark Age of Camelot

You almost never hear anything good about “zerging” — throwing players at a problem, replacing strategy with sheer numbers. Maybe it’s gotten a bad rap; Keen makes some excellent arguments as to why you should love the zerg and how it made DAoC the premier PvP MMO of the decade.

EverQuest

EQ means a lot to us old MMO gamers. I played way too much, but I did come away with some great memories and good friends. Kaozz reminisces about the game a bit and points out that EverQuest will be opening a new progression server later this March. The server will open with no expansions available, then slowly open up expansions as time goes on.

This would be a PERFECT opportunity for gamers to take up the MMO Challenge and dive into the game that shaped modern MMO gaming.

By the way, I was thrilled and humbled to be asked to share my own EQ memories in Justin Olivetti’s “Game Archaeologist” column on Massively. I hope some of my old Crimson Eternity guildies recognize their characters in those screenshots :)

Pirates of the Burning Sea

Zoso at KiaSA writes about his adventures in Flying Lab’s “Pirates of the Burning Sea”. He loved the naval battles and was not so wild about the avatar combat… pretty much the same player verdicts since the game’s launch.

Mythos

Thanks to Jef Reahard, who’s become a regular link on this blog, news that Frogster is ramping up its coming launch of the embattled action MMO across Europe.

I wrote last week that the North American release of Mythos seemed to have fallen off a cliff. That silence was broken Monday with a post from community manager Mundo on the Redbana forums about the state of the NA beta. Seems Hanbitsoft is totally focused on the European launch, and has no dates for its introduction to the states.

At least they allow people to discuss the European release on the forums, now.

LEGO Universe

Speaking of games that seem to have dropped off a cliff; when NetDevil’s LEGO Universe launched last fall, everyone was shedding ink talking about its wonders. Since then, silence. Oz of Kill Ten Rats explains what’s been going on inside the game all this time and — not very much. Not the amount of new content promised, not by a long shot.

Real question: Are 8 year old kids noticing?

EverQuest 2 Extended

After her break-up with EverQuest 2 over the intrusiveness of its cash shop and other issues a few weeks ago, MMOQuest’s Stargrace finds that EQ2X’s housing may just possibly be enough to bring her back to the game in some (free) capacity. Well, the EQ2 “live” game isn’t doing that well; maybe it’s time to get with the program and join the F2P side.

Rift

No getting around it, the blogerati have been drinking in the Rift betas. This last weekend focused on instanced battlegrounds — “warfronts” — and the level 20-27 adventure zones for the two factions.

Tramell of Steel Harmony tried out both warfronts and the Stonefields, a Defiant-controlled zone under attack from the Plane of Earth. I think he got Black Garden and Codex mixed up.

Is Rift a throwback to an earlier era when MMOs required grouping to progress? Pete of Dragonchasers admits that there are many things you will need other players for; but you don’t really need to be grouped for most of them.

Is Blogging Journalism?

Massively’s Jef Reahard, who stirred some controversy last week with his dismissive summary of Rift, is back to address those readers who played the “journalist” card. TL;DR version: Bloggers are not journalists, and GAME bloggers are far too cozy with game developers to get the necessary distance to allow real reporting. Particularly ironic is his condemnation of pro blogs that happily retype game company press releases and call it news. The irony being that Massively.com would be a far slimmer site if reworded press releases were removed.

Oh, I think that’s enough for now. No big Lucent Heart news on the horizon.

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It was a wide, wonderful, weird world back then. The success of EverQuest, Asheron’s Call, Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot had changed the landscape of online adventure gaming. By requiring players to have hardware 3D graphics acceleration in their machines, EverQuest raised the bar for all MMOs that followed.

It’s not easy to track down an 8″ floppy drive these days, but after some calls, I was able to find someone who could read these disks for me, and he sent me a digital copy of the contents. So sit back, grab a snifter of absinthe, put on your bustles and top hats and travel with me back to a time when unicorns grazed the bowling fields and MMORPGs were young.

—

If you’re having trouble releasing ONE MMORPG, why not start another? And if that isn’t working out for you, how but just one more? Glitchless, developers of groundbreaking, never-before-seen, you are not WORTHY of playing MMORPG Dawn, who earlier this year suspended development on Dawn to work on a new RTS set in the same world, Dusk: Dawn Tactics, has today announced that they are pushing all those aside and coming out with an even BETTER game, Racewar Kingdoms. Quoth GM Jeff:

Race War Kingdoms has been completely re-made and is now an entirely different title complete with graphics, and real-time gameplay! A public beta is being held for 3 days, get in before it’s too late!

Complete with graphics! Don’t miss it! Race War Kingdoms, you may remember, was originally a web page where the more you clicked, the more you won. Now it has GRAPHICS!

It wouldn’t be a Glitchless game unless it featured permadeath. As GM Jeff said in a Stratics debate last January, permadeath is a way to ensure that the people who aren’t SERIOUS about roleplaying quit the game, so everyone wins:

*GL-Jeff* Well the anti-perm death crowd has already stated that permdeath would “shorten” the lifespan of the PERSISTANT world. I believe they are already admitting that yes, the players that are not serious about playing for RP purposes will leave the game early.

Well, in reality, groups of PKs would just band up and completely ruin the game for everyone else at no risk to themselves. Jeff has apparently never played Ultima Online. Didn’t we just have this debate with Sierra’s Middle-Earth Online? It’s just weird seeing people seriously argue that EverQuest’s death penalty is not severe enough.

Rumor has it, btw, that the EverQuest devs are considering upping the three hours before your corpse and all your possessions decay to something a little longer. About time.

You know what modern games really need? More lens flare. Seriously.

What’s that game where you can play a dragon, pick up a player in your claws, fly a few thousand feet up, and release? Oh yeah, Horizons. But heck, why stop there? Why not terrorize player-built villages by strafing them with your fire breath? In Horizons, you can be a Vampire (but as long as you kill only players nobody will miss, nobody needs to know). Or a demon, or an angel, an insect, a lizard… 14 races, most never seen before, embroiled in a complex, shifting web of loyalties and all-out blood war.

At least they’re staying mum on the whole permadeath debate…

Artifact Entertainment, makers of Horizons: Empires of Istaria, recently signed a publishing agreement with Korean developers NCsoft. They must have been a little shocked when ex-Ultima guru Lord “Richard Garriott” British grabbed the spotlight away from the Horizons team with news that his Destination Games would merge with NCsoft’s US arm to become NCsoft Austin and develop their own new MMO.

Quoth Artifact CEO David Allen when asked how Horizons and Garriott’s new MMO would compete with each other: “At this point, not at all – Jake and Richard are developing something completely new and innovative; I don’t think they’re even going the traditional RPG route. We’ll have to wait and see!”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch Origin Systems…. Ultima Online Worlds, 3D follow-up to the spectacularly successful (but non-3D) MMO Ultima Online, has been canceled. Asked why this title, which would have taken the Ultima MMO franchise for the first time into the 3D arena, was canceled, Origin’s David Swofford said the decision was made to focus on Ultima Online and try to reclaim the #1 spot among persistent world games from such Johnny-come-latelies as EverQuest and Asheron’s Call:

… We’re trying to get our numbers up higher than they are. We’re already up to about 230,000 subscribers and UO has grown about 80% in the past year. I think that’s one of the reasons that EA and Origin are saying, “Hey, why toy with success?” Rather than going forth with something that could be construed as a competitive product we’re going to put more of our resources on UO and make it even more of a success.

Well, they definitely don’t want to come out with a competitive product….

Information about sports game impresarios Codemasters’ new MMO, Dragon Empires, due out near the middle of next year, continues to trickle out. This groundbreaking game has player guilds warring against one another for control of the cities and resources of the world. According to the press release:

Due in 2002, Dragon Empires is set when magic is plentiful and the lives of humans and dragons intertwined. The game innovates by creating a world of adventures that will be filled with player clans, each striving to rule magnificent cities and, ultimately, empires through tactical dealing or clan-on-clan combat.

You won’t be able to play a dragon, though….

If your tastes run more toward building and crafting than all that messy war everywhere stuff, Atriarch might be more your style. Players will be able to build any structure they can imagine, LEGO-style. Tired of playing elves, dwarves, and elves? Atriarch does away with all that by setting their game on an entirely alien world. And unlike Dawn’s strictly sexual reproduction, Atriarch is a little more “don’t ask, don’t tell” about it. Atriarch lead designer Serafina Pechan says:

Atriarch supports the ability for player characters to have families. We call it the Lineage System. Every player can have its character spawn offspring through asexual reproduction. There are two ways your character’s family and lineage can expand.

It’s always been my fervent, till now unspoken desire to propagate like a bacteria.

News about the game has slowed down a bit recently, but alpha testing is expected to begin soon, and if you’d like to get in on the ground floor, bribery might help…

Of course, if you truly want to ensure your spot as an early Atriarch tester, then bribes in the form of EQ platinum will be accepted on the Povar server. Other suggestions for offerings, donations, or outright bribes can be emailed to: pleeeeeezepickme@atriarch.com ;-)

If war everywhere is what you’re after, Adellion has the stuff. Massive battles. Permadeath. No magic. No elves, dwarves, or any race but human. A world so large that you couldn’t cross it if you set your character dashing across it on horseback for an entire day. Adellion’s recently released FAQ explains all this and a little more about what it means to play in a game where role-playing is enforced:

If you’re not a role-player in fact, you need not apply. Why? Because everything-and we mean everything-in Adellion will be done In Character. If you log onto the game with “Yo-wazzzuuuuppp?” you will be greeted with “Huh?” …

Gotta love a game that spells out why they don’t want you as a player in their FAQ.

EverQuest’s latest experiment, the “anything goes” PvP server Sullon Zek, is now continually posting PvP stats on the aptly named Sullon Zek PvP stats page. As if you needed ANOTHER reason to hate Halfling Druids…

Meanwhile, the game awaits next month’s new expansion, Shadows of Luclin, which will bring an all-new graphics engine, all-new character models, a moon landing which devs assure us won’t be faked, and … hey, if there’s this moon called “Luclin”, how come nobody’s ever seen it before? Huh???

Anyway, EQ might be revamping all its graphics, but it ain’t no Adellion, that’s for sure.

Well, the floppies are getting full so I guess that means its wrap-up time. MMO gaming has never been better, with the huge success of EverQuest, Ultima Online and others spurring the development of dozens of huge worlds full of adventure. 2002 is shaping up to be the best year ever for the MMO genre.

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I’m not gonna say anything snarky about Michael Jackson. When he died yesterday, millions of people all over the world played his music loud and sang along; people gathered to remember him. When you and I die, how many people will even remember we lived? Nobody will remember us for how many max level characters we had or how many nights we spent raiding. We’ll only be remembered by and because of the people whose hearts we touched. Beau Turkey finds the most memorable moments in MMOs are not the levels ground out, but the coming together of friends to work on something as a team.

Space Michael, btw, was the name of Jackson’s character in the Dreamcast game, “Space Channel 5“. I played that game so many times I could finish the entire thing in less than an hour. About 3/4 of the way through, you’d have the chance to save Space Michael by doing some of his signature moves. After, he’d join your crew and dance with you through the rest of the game.

In a weird bit of irony, Roy Greenhilt FINALLY returns to the land of the living in Order of the Stick. Roy, we MISSED YOU. Think you waited too long for a rez? Roy waited SIX MONTHS. And we waited two years (and 222 strips).

There’s actually one place in the world — and just one, really — where people care how many max level characters you have, and that place is a gaming convention. SOE’s Fan Faire starts today and we expect to hear more about the upcoming expansions for EQ and EQ2, the “go live” date for EQ’s new Mayong 51/50 server, and other fun stuff. Expect a lot of attention paid to Free Realms. Lazaretto is in Las Vegas with a live report from the pre-show — we’ll be watching his blog for more information all day.

I like how, in the SOE Fan Fair page, they list Vanguard after the canceled “Matrix Online” and “Trading Card Games”.

Growing up in the US, I didn’t know all that much about Australia. Our family was friends with an Australian family, but aside from the accent, they were just like anyone else, no difference. Australians were seen in US movies and TV as a rough and tumble people ready for a good laugh or a good fight, full of the enjoyment of life. That image has been shattered recently by Australia’s decent into the abyss of “why won’t anyone think of the children?” where games not suitable for children between the ages of 15 and 18 cannot be imported or played over the Internet. Oz gamer Stropp doesn’t want to live in a “Nanny State” where the government imposes complete censorship in the guise of “protecting the children”, any wants to spread the word — this is how freedoms get taken away.

Copra takes a look at the current state of World of Warcraft and for the life of him, can’t figure out how a new player could ever even think about joining WoW’s end game. Isn’t that the reason, though, that they do a complete gear reset every expansion? So everyone starts out at the same place every two years. New players only have to wait a couple of years for the next expansion and they’ll be fine.

Software developers have to constantly deal with the dreaded “check list” — if your program doesn’t have all the features every other program of that sort has, you fail and that’s all there is to it. MMOs aren’t immune to this. Myrix asks MMO devs to throw the check list away and just make a fun GAME. Don’t need crafting? Don’t add it just because WoW has it!

Gordon of We Fly Spitfires points to a really cool and non-condescending documentary about virtual worlds, watching it now…. Oh, hai, Raph Koster!

Lastly, Keen takes a look at Warhammer’s new “Land of the Dead” and finds in it the same sort of realm give-and-take he liked so much in Dark Age of Camelot’s “Darkness Falls” realm war dungeon.

Traveling again this weekend, so I’ll be back Monday. Keep gaming!

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Hey, didja hear the news? Mark Jacobs is leaving Mythic and Mythic is being merged into Bioware! Jacobs was the public face of Mythic for so long, I can’t think of one without the other, and I can’t think of an upside to his leaving for the game I once loved, Dark Age of Camelot.

Keen thought EA was past absorbing studios for their properties and then squeezing out the help. Snazfg urges people not to pillory either EA or Jacobs until more is known. Heartless_ said he knew it all along (I guess he did!). Ardwulf wonders if this means Mythic will be getting some Bioware resources (don’t count on it). Tobold suspects the merge came because Warhammer did not meet the goals Jacobs promised. Stropps agrees. Abalieno at Cesspit would have preferred this ended differently, with more learning and caring. Werit detects an air of schadenfreud among some of the commentators. And Scott Jennings reminisces about Mark and happier days at Mythic.

I don’t know anything about Mark or Mythic or EA, but I have been working in IT for thirty years and I know quite a lot about mergers. When a big company buys a smaller company, the executives of that smaller company either embrace change and become big dogs in the new company, or conflict with the new bosses and leave (always to seek out new opportunities). This news says to me that regardless of how Warhammer did or does, Jacobs almost certainly didn’t mesh well with EA, and now the big bosses are gonna do things THEIR way. Bioware is the new golden boy studio, so they get to raid Mythic, and they’ll be top dog until they slip up.

I just wonder what will happen to Dark Age of Camelot when the dust settles?

Speaking of Ages of Things Beginning With the Letter ‘C’, Age of Conan had an update yesterday and things went … pretty well, says Openedge1. So more power to them.

WAR and AoC came out around the same time. Both aimed to be the choice for WoW players who wanted better graphics and more PvP. Both were crushed when Blizzard released the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft. While WAR has kept steady on course with being the “WoW PvP alternative”, AoC has scaled back and focused on incremental improvements to their game play and growing their customer base gradually — the EVE Online model. No longer looking at WoW’s millions but just working on making a good game for its players, it might yet win where WAR has not.

In Darkfall news, looks like if you’re playing Darkfall now and want to restart on the new North American server when it opens, you’ll have to buy the game all over again. Keen is flabbergasted, and vows not to play DF at all, where he’d planned to give it a shot on the new server. Beau Turkey says hey, Aventurine is an indie developer and they need the money. What’s the big deal? Tobold lifts his rule against commenting on Darkfall by noting that Aventurine is the one company that takes their hardcore rep right into the “Company vs Player” realm.

So, you know, lots of stuff went down yesterday. At least we have WoW as the steady rock upon which we can stand and watch the turmoil swirl below.

Or can we? Spinks notes that Blizzard is trying to use social engineering to balance WoW’s tank classes. Trying to discourage guilds from using warriors to tank raids? Is that something a company should really be manipulating?

Lastly, Suzina at Kill Ten Rats takes Lord of the Rings Online’s summer festival maze as a metaphor for these sorts of games themselves. Players as the rats, and a grind of pointless accomplishments as the reward. Did I say pointless? Hey, she “… could get a new wall-paper for my house or a new fish-slap emote!”

The path to uberness, folks, is paved with cheese.

I have added a plugin that makes this blog look better on the iPhone, so if you ARE reading this on the iPhone — it looks better, and that’s why :)

Enjoy your Thursday and keep on gaming!

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Yes, we’re back to the Daily Blogroll. Another allergy attack has left me asleep by 9PM, which really shortens the nights for me.

Is Aion too derivative to be successful? Tobold thinks so. In fact he wonders why people would pay full price (US$15/month) for a WoW-like like Aion when they can get the real thing for the same price, or a free WoW-like in Runes of Magic. He also doesn’t hold out much hope for Fallen Earth, calling it too much like failed MMO Tabula Rasa “just working less well, being less fun, and having less good graphics”. So that’s that.

Being a WoW-like doesn’t look like it will keep many away from Aion. Spinks thinks the beauty of the game, the storytelling and the PvP (as well as the third dimension with flight) will bring people in. Caliga of MMO Gamers has the rundown of the extra stuff you can expect in the collector’s edition, as well as an automatic pass into the beta.

Speaking of new games, Hudson has the latest round-up of the news Cryptic has been leaking about the state of Champions Online, due to be released September, same as Aion.

Having played both betas, I would go with Aion if forced to choose, but the Champions NDA prevents me from saying just why.

Syncaine at Hardcore Casual looks at Blizzard’s limiting of the formerly-open Wintergrasp PvP zone to 100v100 with some measure of skepticism based on other games (like Warhammer, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE Online, Darkfall and others) being able to handle much larger fights. Tobold uses some bad math to make the case for it being a strain on resources to keep it unlimited. (In a client-server architecture, resource use increase linearly, not geometrically).

Blizzard is using WoW as a money machine to support development on other upcoming titles. As long as the WoW ATM keeps spitting out million dollar bills, everything is FINE and it’s easier to limit players than add more resources.

The best thing about WoW, if you’re Blizzard, is that you can’t beat players away with a STICK, as Zubon Ethic found when he tried to sign back up. No matter how many roadblocks Blizzard threw in his way, no matter how much it cost him to do it, he was gonna play WoW again, dammit.

Lastly, if you’re not a fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, I can only guess you’ve never seen any of them. To even start with why I love them would take a thousand words, so I won’t say more than: The very first anime I ever saw was Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind”. A friend sat me down and made me watch it, and he had a weird smile on his face. It was in Japanese, I didn’t understand a word of it, nor what was going on, but even just with the pictures and Jo Hisaishi’s amazing music to go on, I was blown away. When I later saw it dubbed in English, I was blown away yet again because the plot was just as amazing as the visuals.

For the past decade or so, Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli has had a deal with Disney where they would bring Miyazaki’s films to the US dubbed in English by major voice talents, uncut and unrearranged, exactly as how they were released in Japan, except in English. Since then, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle have had astonishingly wonderful US theatrical releases, and this summer comes his latest masterpiece, Ponyo, about a goldfish who makes a wish to be human — with disastrous consequences.

See it, you’ll love it.

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In EVE Online, at my new home at the Sisters of EVE base in the Arnon system, with Mining IV, Refining III, and two Miner II mining lasers and purely selling in-system, I make about 27.5K ISK per minute of mining. If I processed the ore at my current level and sold it in the best market within seven jumps, I would make about 26K ISK/minute of mining, not including travel time. The question is, how many sessions of mining would it take to pay for the skills and equipment necessary to make refining more profitable than just selling the ore straight with no additional skills going toward mining? EVEMon has me at about ten days to having the skills necessary to fly a ORE Retriever mining barge… EVE is the first game I have HAD to play with a spreadsheet open.

Speaking of which, new EVE patch is out today. Just bug fixes, but they do install a new version of DirectX? Why? Doesn’t Microsoft keep my computer’s DirectX updated with their updates?

Anyway, on to the blog roll.

And because I’m en EVE noob, I’ve been poring through the back posts of the most famous noob of them all, Wilhelm of the Ancient Gaming Noob where he notes that the 1.6m skill point boundary where the 100% skill point bonus disappears used to allow an exploit where you would start a new really long skill just before your noob time expired, and it would stay double experience for the duration. Well, they nerfed that, but the exploiters still win.

Remember Pirates of the Burning Sea aka EVE of the Caribbean? The pirate-themed historical trading MMO was based around three-realm RvR but never really struck a spark in players. Via Massively comes the news that Flying Labs thinks players are having fun the wrong way, by farming mission objectives that give the best loot. This has gotten to the point that that’s all people do, similar to the old problems with Warhammer’s scenarios and more recently with City of Hero’s Architect missions. Rather than making missions more fun or identify player perceived need for those particular rewards, FL is removing loot from mission NPCs….

I dunno. Sounds dodgy to me at best. I get that the rewards were not intended, but PotBS is a pretty brutal game to begin with, on the same scale of complexity with EVE Online, but with more punishing PvP, when I played.

Speaking of balance between realms and Warhammer (weren’t we?), Keen talks a little about Warhammer’s new “Land of the Dead” expansion which will solve all the issues with realm wars and give people reasons to fight the good fight for their king. Or will it? Due to Warhammer’s two-sided conflict vs Dark Age of Camelot’s three, one side can dominate a server so that the other side perhaps NEVER gets a chance to try the new content, since it can only be reached by the leaders in the realm war. Keen points out that DAoC’s three-sided conflict kept all objectives in play all the time, and I remember DAoC’s version of LoD, Darkness Falls, as often changing hands a couple of times nightly. It was FUN.

We reported last week about Thom Terrazas leaving Vanguard to become the new executive producer of EverQuest, following Clint Worely’s departure for an unannounced project (EQ3…). Nostalgian Lazaretto of Complete Heal happened to mention this on the Vanguard forums and … oops … Nobody had bothered to tell the Vanguard players that they were suddenly without a producer. And hilarity ensued.

Saylah hates Free Realms. She hates the idea of it. She hates zoning. She hates instances. So why is she a level 7 chef with a satchel of food? It’s those damn addictive minigames is what!

Ogrebears, one of EQ2′s most renowned bloggers, left the game a couple of months ago to play WoW instead. Since he seemed to be back in the fold for his Norrath Street View project, I asked him if he was back. No, no, no. He will never play EQ2 again, and this is why. Hold on, are you sure you want to be playing MMOs at all?

Via Massively, a complete writeup of Mortal Online, the upcoming all PvP, all the time, completely sandbox, do what you wilt shall be the whole of the law, kind of game. Like, you know, Darkfall. Players in Spellborn were very much looking forward to Mortal Online whereas they were pretty dismissive of Darkfall. Probably because they haven’t had a chance to try Mortal Online, yet. Serious PvP MMOs are a different breed. Many people had just come off Darkfall or The Realm Online before Spellborn, were headed toward Mortal Online, and probably were thinking about what comes after that already.

After waffling a bit over tech support issues, wondering if he would continue to play Age of Conan or if this would be his time to quit MMOs forever, Openedge1 is loving the upcoming patch which fixes combat and is wonderfulness in a box, so Viva le Conan!

Syp wants MMO NPCs to man up and solve their OWN problems rather than snare unwitting players to solve them — and like as not just ask the next person who comes along to do the same thing! The real problem is one of respect. Ever tell a child to go do something just to keep them busy and out of your hair while you’re doing something? Well, MMO worlds are populated entirely with people who just want players to go away and will tell them ANYTHING.

Let’s all send good thoughts Crookshankz’s way as he camps Emperor Crush in EverQuest’s Crushbone. Mmmm…. and get that nasty inky assassin, too!

Hudson and about a million others reported that the Champions Online launch has been delayed until September. I have to admit I was looking forward to this game until I found it was modeled after the WoW quest model — you know, get all the quests from exclamation-point decorated NPCs at a quest hub, follow the quest helper to clearly marked areas on the map where the quest may be completed, complete the quest and return for xp? Sorry. I’m done with mindless quest grind MMOs. Way to be heroic.

I was REALLY looking forward to it, too.

Lars at MMOment of Zen would like to take EQ2′s mentoring system and expand it so that your level would be automatically set in accordance with whatever zone you happened to be in, so you would never actually outlevel content. That sounds… cool! At least if the rewards (xp, AA xp and loot) still scaled back to be useful to you at your actual level.

And that’s about it for today. Keep gaming, and if you are flying in EVE or mining in Free Realms, FRIEND ME!

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Penny Arcade starts off Freeday Friday with a little bit of snark about the Chronicles of Spellborn payment plan. While it’s true that you can now use a credit card like for every other game… I think trying to figure out their Coins-based plan is a fun game all on its own, don’t you?

Reported everywhere is Lord of the Rings Online’s second anniversary promotion. Free to try again, 25% experience bonus on kills that stacks with all other bonuses, tokens you can trade in for cool stuff, etc etc. The xp boost is very nice, anyway. I haven’t seen what the tokens trade in for, but I have my suspicions I have a lot of Blueberry Tart recipes in my future.

Tobold talks about the new Free Realms trading card game and why Free Realms can never come close to challenging WoW. Is there anyone who really thinks ANY game will challenge WoW? I mean, when you have WoW itself becoming a minigame portal with Peggle now joining Bejeweled as super casual games you now need not leave WoW to play… WoW, like Facebook, isn’t a game so much as it is a platform.

The Original Runic Games Fansite has a pretty good summary of Taylor Balbi’s GDC impressions of Torchlight, Runic Studios’ first Diablo II/Mythos-esque single player Action RPG and seed for their future MMO. Torchlight is said to be released this year, which will keep it out of the path of the Diablo 3 juggernaut expected within the next two years. I want to play them both!

Syncaine of Hardcore Casual has a little bit of fun with the braggarts and whiners of the Darkfall Forums. A little more respect for the fellow fans of hardcore impact PvP? These are the elite killers, you know.

Since Planetside and Tabula Rasa blazed the Shooter MMO trail and showed just how profitable the unholy fusion of first person shooters and a level grind could be, MTV Multiplayer went out and asked massive shooter devs from The Agency, APB, Earthrise, Combat Arms and CrimeCraft how they planned to put this relatively new sub-genre back on its feet.

Syp from Bio Break takes time out from not sleeping to marvel at how Mythic is taking more and more ideas from its previous MMO, Dark Age of Camelot, to patch perceived flaws in its current MMO, Warhammer Online. Three sides? Yes, please. FOUR sides? OMG awesome! Bringing the RvR dungeon of Darkness Falls forward is a good first step. I had loads of fun there in DAoC.

Beau Turkey of Spouse Aggro writes about how MMOs begin to understand that there is more to gaming than a desire to wade through gore.

OMG, is that an Elric Melnibone/Michael Moorcock/Blue Oyster Cult reference? Yes. Yes, it was. Watch the video as E(l)ric Bloom talks about the plot of Moorcock’s Elric series, then BOC swings into Black Blade…

I just wanna be a lover, not a red-eyed screaming ghoul? Hey, Beau, this song is ABOUT YOUR POST!

Lars from MMOment of Zen thinks that writable books in EQ2 are a good start, but they could do so much more. Commenter Tholal points out that Ultima Online has had these features for years, going on centuries now. Hey, where are the friggin ULTIMA ONLINE BLOGS? How are we supposed to KNOW these things?

And lastly, it’s Bio Break’s Syp again with six ways to leave a bad pickup group. I’ve tried them all, but #6 is by far my favorite.

See you Monday!

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The Beatles: Rock Band is offering membership in an exclusive fan club if you pre-order their US$249.99 Limited Edition Bundle, with perhaps two mikes for vocal harmonizing. Which would be cool, but … $249.99? Well, at least it isn’t $250.00. (via @samhouston)

Syp over at Bio Break doesn’t like Elves much. But elves are AWESOME! Read through Tolkein’s “The Silmarillion” sometime.

Iluvatar: Hi, elves! We’re going to make you immortal, you have a magical language — no wait, TWO magical languages, have a connection with nature, are the best fighters, can put an arrow through a gnat’s eye from three leagues away, can walk on top of snow, move silently, make trees sentient, and … oh, hi Man! Gifts? Lessee… your lives will be nasty, brutish and, oh yes, SHORT. Mortality is My gift to you! Now run along!

Elf: Hey, you gave MAN something! You like him better than me!

Iluvatar: Oh! Here’s the ability to craft magical rings, capture the light of stars in gems, make magical ships that can sail straight out of the mortal world, the ability to write better poetry and songs than anyone else, make cities out of trees, heal the sick, ride faster than anyone, and vanish when threatened.

Elf: Still kinda mad at you for giving Man mortality.

Iluvatar: Oh, okay. If you ever want it really bad, you can become mortal, too.

Stingite over at The Friendly Necromancer is feeling a little masochistic and has found the perfect solution in Wizard 101 Central’s PvP Tournaments. Props to the organizers for putting some incentive into Wizard 101′s dueling arenas, and next time? Earthquake!

Green Armadillo at Player vs Developer wonders why SOE has decided to compete with an entire crafting profession, Carpenters, with its new RMT furniture. A very valid concern — there are master carpenters on every server who have a great deal of fame (and make a great deal of coin) by decorating people’s homes and guild halls. But if they can’t even offer the very best items — sold for real cash in the Station Marketplace — then what’s their purpose? EQ2 is one of the very few MMOs that offer such freedom in decorating. Tampering with that is NOT a good move on SOE’s part.

Today is Velociraptor Awareness Day, because people should watch out before exploring power stations or cafeterias — there could be raptors! Warning — following that link will reactivate your Facebook account. It happened to me, and that’s a little scarier than mere raptors. Via XKCD, of course.

It’s not hard to make the kind of MMO people really want. Make full time, all the time, everywhere PvP, allow the players to make their own cities and rule the world, raid, capture and destroy other cities, and if you can’t take it, go back to your happy fun carebear world, EverQuest tourist? EverQuest? Yup, Shadowbane was EverQuest’s Darkfall, the game that was going to give players what they REALLY wanted — the threat of constant death. Shadowbane’s long and troubled history comes to an end May 1. EverQuest, for the record, is still going strong. When I played Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane was going to be the answer for all the failings in DAoC’s RvR. You couldn’t go out to Emain Mecha without hearing how SB would do it better. Now DAoC has a sequel (Warhammer Online) and… Shadowbane is closing. Do people REALLY want 100% all the time PvP?

Stargrace has figured out how to level a character in EverQuest II with 200% Adventure Experience for free! Well, for a month, anyway, using a new account with Recruit a Friend to essentially powerlevel an existing account, which has enough prior 80s on it to give a substantial boost to adventure xp for all characters. It’s pretty complicated, it’s better if she explains it :)

Happy Saturday!

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Public quests, open groups, the excitement of the Tome of Knowledge, all things never seen before the evil geniuses at Mythic brewed them up in charmed cauldrons on some fog-shrouded Scottish moor, with the witch-goddess Hecate shrieking over it.

It’s a well-known fact that the color red in the game packaging is made from blood.

It’s true. Look it up. Because that’s just how hardcore they are. They do it for YOU.

Simulated Warhammer screenshot

What IS Realm vs Realm and how is it different from PvP?

How about seventeen factions, any of which would happily crush the throats of the others? You can only trust your own kind. Maybe. That’s war everywhere. That’s Warhammer… the miniatures game. Oops. Wrong one.

Well, imagine FOUR factions, at each other’s throats. In their own lands they are only somewhat safe, but step outside or into a contested zone and BAM! Constantly shifting alliances, places you just can’t go and… oh wait, that was EverQuest. Evil vs Humans vs Elves vs Shorties.

Okay, but with four factions you get stalemate, so that’s pretty boring. Three factions, though — the two weaker against the strong one so nobody can ever rest at the top, never able to rest, that’s… oh, never mind. That’s Dark Age of Camelot — or Planetside.

Well, how about two sides? Good vs Evil? Horde vs Alliance? That’s the Realm vs Realm difference. That’s why it’s not simply “Player vs Player”. That’s what you can only find in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Along with public quests, the Tome of Knowledge, and open groups, the fight of good vs evil, free people vs the minions of Mordor, it’s your realm against the other realm.

And the stakes are incredibly high. Everything you do moves the battle to one side or another. And when you finally have done enough to tip the balance forever to your side — that’s when the whole thing resets because it’s WAR FOREVER! WAAAAAGH!!!!

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Thanks for stopping by for our second exclusive look at Mythic’s Warhammer Online: The Age of Reckoning. No game has ever done PvP, er, RvR, in quite the same way. Not exactly.

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