Whenever I find a useful MMO-related link I'll pop it...
( ...right here, updated 17 March 2009Collapse )

I am up to my eyeteeth in non-MMO goodness. Or badness, depending. Sorry so silent and so absent.

However, this is quite amusing if you're a geriatric curmudgeon like me. Nice little April Fool's nod.

Oregon pirate things for whatever reason. I guess "The Goonies" fault. This point, a little less to produce pirate pranks are the Renaissance holiday, so if you want to dress the foolish clothing, wear a silly accent, and drink his own foolish, you will be a smidge down the foolish meters if are you a pirate.

I transplanted to Oregon, so I do not care, "National Talk Like a Pirate" day. I am a nerd, though, so I think pirates are beautiful, leading me to try all kinds of pirated games. My time and "fighting" is a short-lived and despicable, and I have been pondering the game item mall point, so I decided to let the "century nautical online" vortex.

I can not let the last character creators. Never mind that small, which makes small portrait of the "Customize your face" procedure is totally futile, I do not understand the game is trying to tell me. Ah ... I can could whether or not I really want to spend effort.

I did not.

Advice: If you want the game market, a very specific country - the United States, a nation chosen randomly - then God's love in order to ensure that the game has been more than a symbol of the language is similar to the country's mother tongue.

Quick quiz about "what type of player are you", although it doesn't distill the answers down into "You are Starbuck!" or anything along those lines. It just ranks what motivates you by percentiles, with 50% being -- wait for it -- dead average.

Nick Yee's Motivation Assessment.

I ranked fairly high in the Immersion group. I find this interesting because I usually dislike people tossing the Immersion word around; I'm glad to finally get a definition of Immersion I can now wave at whenever people gripe about it.

I’ve been incredibly busy the past couple of months, and while a few projects are winding down (getting a house ready to rent, a house where the previous owners didn’t seal the toilets correctly, leading to a nice cocktail of urine and fecal water rotting the subfloor and floor… YUM!), others are ramping up (data migration from one system to another, a process that will be… entertaining for many weeks to come, in a fashion not dissimilar to the aforementioned subflooring). As a result I’ve had little time to game at all, much less play anything for more than an hour at a time. Still, I have kept up with the various blogs about MMOs, and so I’m happy to babble about, oh, Real Money Trades, aka microtransaction-based games, aka Item Mall games. (They’re also known as “free to play”, but that’s akin to “FreeCreditScore433.com” or such sites, as in “not really free.”) Since I’ve seen some grumblings about the first two terms -- “grumbling” being “taking a monomolecular wire to hairs,” honestly -- I’ll stick with “Item Mall” games.

( Sticky items behind the cut here. No, not like that you perv.Collapse )

A very brief note, written simply because there's been a lot of babbling about Darkfall (here's a sample):

I hope Darkfall does very well. I doubt it will. I hope it does well because it's good for the MMO industry to diversify and to satisfy lots of different people by having lots of different offerings out there. I doubt it will because the core attractor -- smash everyone and smash them until they cry -- is not widely appealing for a wide variety of reasons.

One of these reasons is very simple. The more you allow people to be vicious dickheads to each other, the more likely you'll attract vicious dickheads to the game. If your primary goal is to treat other people like punching bags, and most games won't let you do that, and then one comes along that does... that person is going to go to that game.

On top of that, if such a person becomes everyone else's punching bag, they're going to leave.

If Darkfall's able to thrive with 20-30K players, then I will count it as a success. If it grows to over 80K by this time next year, there's one of two things going on: 1) Like EVE Online, the "OMG PVP" of the game is wildly exaggerated, or 2) there's a lot more switch people out there than I thought, and I need to invest in ball gags and buggy whips ASAP.

I touched on this a bit in my genre rant, but I'd like to elaborate on the MMO life cycle. It's my understanding that the typical MMO's population changes over time rather like this chart (keeping in mind that there's enough variance in MMOs that the word "typical" may mean dick):



( Oooooh! Pikchurs!Collapse )

In a fit of nostalgia I decided to whip out my decrepit City of Heroes characters and give them a farewell parade across the stage, like the Rolling Stones on the Viagra tour.

( And here there are.Collapse )

Since I have maybe two readers, and that's on a good day, I feel pretty comfortable putting this post up. I figure when you eviscerate me about my thoughts, you'll at least do it gently. Please note I'll vacillate between the present and past tense here, mostly because I'm lazy and don't plan on checking for grammatical correctness but partly because I'm not sure if I'll continue playing or not.
( Find fault with the following....Collapse )

A ways back there was a discussion over at Terra Nova spawned by a simple question: ”why is Fantasy the predominant genre of game-like virtual worlds?” Why isn’t space opera the de facto genre, or modern espionage? The question generated a fair number of responses, and like most broad questions there’s a wide variety of (probable) answers. I’m going to focus on two intertwined reasons.

( Behold the reasons here.Collapse )