deep space 9

World of Warcraft Client Patch 3.2.2

2009-09-25T05:46:00.001-07:00

After the good news that the China server for World of Warcraft <a href="http://mmorpgindex.com" title="MMORPG">mmorpg</a> is now back up and running after two months of hiatus, it's time to get all patched up. Patch 3.2.2 has just been released by Blizzard, and we're giving you a sneak peek at what's in it. 

It's a lengthy list, you'll have to go to their site for the full update: 

General 

a, The Brood Mother Returns 
- After years of lurking in her lair battling the many brave adventurers who travelled from afar to challenge her, Onyxia returns stronger than before to commemorate <a href="http://mmorpgindex.com" title="World of Warcraft MMORPG">World of Warcraft</a>'s five-year anniversary. 
- Onyxia has been scaled to offer new challenges to level 80 players in 10- and 25-player modes. 
- Adjusted for modern raiding, but with the fundamental experience of fighting the Brood Mother still in effect, including the horrors of her Deep Breaths! 
- Onyxia will now drop level 80 item versions of some classic loot items from the level 60 encounter. 
- Brood of Onyxia, a very rare 310%-speed mount modeled after Onyxia herself will be available for the luckiest of challengers. 
b, Armor Penetration Rating: The amount of armor penetration gained per point of this rating has been reduced by 12%.

PvP 

- Battlegrounds 
- Players level 11 and higher will now always see a daily Battleground quest, as the quest giver will only offer daily quests for a Battleground in which a player is eligible to participate according to level bracket (i.e. players levels 11-20 will always be offered a Warsong Gulch daily quest, while players levels 11-50 will be offered either an Arathi Basin or a Warsong Gulch daily quest, etc.). 

Source : <a href="http://mmorpgindex.com" title="MMORPG">Mmorpg Index</a>

Test blog entry

2009-09-19T08:21:00.001-07:00

This is an mmorpg blog, and a blog entry of this mmorpg blog made for testing if it is still working.

Shot Online - New versions

2008-09-28T21:12:00.001-07:00

Hamburg, July 30th 2008 - Leading European MMOG publisher gamigo AG is proud to announce the forthcoming launch of the Spanish and French versions of the internationally successful MMO sports title "Shot Online". Both new versions will be available for beta testers in mid August, and will be released commercially later this year. The respective websites can already be reached at www.shot-online.eu

The only realistic MMO golfing simulation - play free online mmorpgs like runescape no download

Shot Online is a comprehensive and realistic golfing experience, offering players over 250 different holes to play. Players can gain experience points for every well-played course, in order to level up and become the ultimate golfing professional. Beyond that, they have the chance to buy hundreds of optional items to improve their abilities even further. Although there is the possibility to buy certain items for real money, Shot Online remains completely free because every object can also be bought with the in-game currency,either from an NPC or in the auction house. While up to four players can compete in a direct match at any time, there will be special events and tournaments for everyone on a regular basis, with great prizes to be won. Of course there are lots of useful community features, which give players the chance to chat with their friends, meet new people and form guilds to play as a team.

Gamigo invites new players from all over the world - best free online mmorpg

After a very successful year for the German version of the game, now with over 150,000 registered players, gamigo is finishing up the French and Spanish versions of the worldwide popular sports MMOG, like 2.4.2 wow servers. These versions will not only be available to players in France and Spain, but every player from around the globe speaking one of these languages can become part of the growing international community. In mid August, players will have the chance to check out the new versions of the game for the first time, in an extensive beta testing period. The final version will commence shortly afterwards. Right now, players can already check out the official website in both new languages and meet up with other golfers in the forums. "We are excited to launch Shot Online in two new languages, so we can give hundreds of thousands of players worldwide the chance to experience this great game", says Sven Ossenbrüggen, CEO gamigo AG. "With the new versions of Shot Online and other great, free games coming up in additional languages, we are showing our commitment to expanding our influence in the European gaming business." Shot Online will be released as a beta version in mid August, with a completely free final version following shortly afterwards later. Players can go to the official website www.shot-online.eu right now, and already register to be one of the first players to check out the new versions.

- Gamigo AG - mmorpg list

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Level 50 at least...

2008-09-15T19:25:00.000-07:00

Hello mates, welcome! I'm very happy to inform that around week ago my first character advanced through all level and now I'm on 50 level :-) (until premiere of Mines of Moria anyway...)

What's new? first of all like other players on my level I'm doing deeds, there are lots of deeds in game but i pick few and all my time im spending on grinding..i don't like this after playing in Lord of the Rings Onlinebut some traits ( when you complete deed you get traits) are very good.

On the screen Mikevorn (me) vs Helchgam, he killed then all my fellowship including me :/

For the example when you reach Valor trait on level 10 you've got:

+ 286 to Morale (something like HP)

+ 10 Mighty

+ 5.8 non-Combat Morale Regeneration (if i remember correctly )

another cool trait for my class is Discipline you can get on level 10:

+30 Might

+5.0% Disease Resistance

-1.5% Melee Vulnerability

You can pick max 5 at the same time traits and when you add each one to your character, you became really strong. I will write something about other traits for combat next time.

I'm playing champion, and if you are player from Gilrain server you can find me under name

Mikevorn :-)

leave a comment if you know me cya mates on Lotro

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About online gaming communities

2008-09-13T07:04:00.000-07:00

Who loves playing online games ? I do. You might decide me as a computer game freak but yes, I am one of those millions of various online gamers from around the world that spends a lot of time playing in front of the computer screen.
Anyway, what's the occasion to not get hooked? You get the chance to play the latest and coolest games. You get the occasion to talk and interact to other players. Plus you gain the opportunity to show to the whole online game society of how skillful you are as a gamer.
It is true that I have been an online gamer for many years now. It is just that the feeling of winning online matches has never been this sweeter, and the idea of tasting online defeat has never been this worse. Hopping from one online game sites to other is also not new to me, for I am the type of gamer that loves to analysis of what each of those game sites offer. But between my latest online game site expeditions, I just recently found out a golden find: free online games. Don't shrivel in fear now. Keep from being dumbfounded by the stunning name. Instead, be very excited. Fly or die might not be known as of the moment but its rate of membership growth is phenomenal ever since the first day it was formally launched. There's must be a great reason behind that, isn't it?
I am definitely serious on saying that this is one of those multiplayer online gaming sites that will get your attention, and will totally deserve your gaming appreciation. And if you are an online gaming fan yourself.
What is something not to love about online multiplayer games site? The free online games you can play here will totally bring the best gamer in you. Love strategy games? Try their 8-Ball and 9-Ball pool games. Do you love number puzzles? Then brace yourselves when you play the very innovative Xudoku, their online game version of the most fashionable number puzzle game. Or how about some nice chess matches?

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Updates : Batlefield 2

2008-09-07T16:43:00.001-07:00

I had registered my game with the company when i first bought it but was amazed to know that i was getting a free upgrade to the game for free.
I got it on the email and accepted the offer and i had to fill out my address and so on and said that i should receive a new cd in a week or two with lots more maps and weapons :D Anyways, free stuffs are always fun but i love battle field games.
Just the online play tho. I hate to play it offline as all the challenges i get are computer. human touch to the game is totally different and your playing with someone who can shoot u back , unlike the computer programmed shooters who you can easily fool like the time i went from back of the guy and shot him and he never looked back. Game programmers need to really think about all this.

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Midnight Club 3 mmorpg is hacked

2008-08-19T18:54:00.001-07:00

As usual, I was playing my favorite game midnight club 3. For those of you who don't know what this game is. Its a nice car racing game. From the first time i bought this game i started to do offline races and won all the nice cars. After that i stopped playing offline and just played online as its more fun playing with real humans than computers . When i used to play Midnight Club 2 on computer, me and my friends used to modify the files of the games and make cars faster and other great stuff on it but i though it was not possible to do it on consoles. Seems some people have edited mc3's files and burned it back on a cd for ps2 and have started to cheat on the game. I was racing as usual and this guy came super fast. And do tricks that were not even available for the game and i asked him to teach me and he told me that that he had modded the game.

So i copied my game files to computer and looked over the files and most of the files were same as might night club 2 so i edited few things to make me go faster and ripped the files back to cd and used my magic swap to get online with a ripped files cd and was amazed that it worked flawlessly and then in few minutes. Everyone who saw me started asking me how i am doing it and annoyed me so much and i put my default cd back on to play it the normal way because i don't support cheating on the game. so guys go ahead mod your mc3. Till next time. By : Satish (MMORPG-X)

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GTA Goes Live !

2008-08-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

Sales of GTA has been going up in Thailand and seems everyone loves it as much i love GTA but there is a difference between a game and a real life. My friend was telling me he wants another child after his computer been having problem too much since kids now days learn so fast. A teenager in Thailand confessed on robbing and killing a taxi driver. Seems he has been playing GTA just too much. I wouldn't be surprised if some teenager wore armors and went to school and tried to kill his fellow friends. I hope he can reload his life and do a fresh start when he gets out of jail. I also heard in news last night that some kid jumped over 10 story building hoping that superman would come and save him. unfortunately superman was busy playing GTA. For last time there is no real superman but don't be so sure about that regarding batman tho. Well, I am warning all of you guys not to believe too much on these fairly land stuff because they are only good to see on tv and play them but don't ever try to actually do it! or else you will end up as that Thailand Guy! :O But i wonder how it would feel to live such life.. like lets say world of warcraft, It sure would be fun to wear those cool armors and kill monsters and doing what you want without any consequences. That would be a care free wonderful life but unfortunately life is not like that or else i would be killing another goblin in runescape right now and would own 10 cars on GTA. Also guys don't forget to comment on this article telling me of the funny things you know about games taking over real life. I would love to hear the comments from you guys! and did you know you can subscribe to our RSS feed and be update with latest news. Till next time!

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Star Trek Online webcast

2008-08-08T17:04:00.000-07:00

"Mr. Leonard Nimoy will be appearing at our event at the Official Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas."-Cryptic. The event will take place at 1:30 p.m. PDT on Sunday, August 10th in the Gene Roddenberry Theater at the Las Vegas Hilton. The startrek online do not want to leave you out! They will broadcast the event LIVE via webcast. Please visit the Startrek online website for details on how to join the webcast. Join the Star Trek Online community by 11:59 p.m. PDT on Sunday, August 17, for a chance to win a copy of Star Trek Online and a lifetime subscription!(Sounds good!!)

Source : MMORPG-X - Online games news website

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Researching gold farms

2008-08-05T03:30:00.000-07:00

Via Broken Toys I scholarly most this academic essay on metallic farming. 87 pages of research, with engrossing estimates, same for the sort of metallic farmers (400,000) and metallic buyers (5 to 10 million). The essay covers everything from the statement of what RMT is, to jural aspects, to discussing metallic job as a designate of money from matured to nonindustrial countries.

What it fails to name is that metallic job is a termination of intense mettlesome design. Gold job effectuation that whatever lawful contestant finds whatever portion state in a MMORPG so boring, but necessary, that he is primed to clear somebody added to endeavor the mettlesome for him. And that is pretty exceptional in the earth of entertainment. Nobody pays somebody added to go and check a flick for him, or to go and dispense a pair of hoops for him in a cordial mettlesome of basketball. Nobody buys a highscore for Tetris, or an modern spend mettlesome for Grand Theft Auto. In nearly every forms of recreation and games, the outlay of instance is the *purpose* of the activity.

At whatever saucer in the forthcoming somebody module conceive how to attain a MMORPG in which every parts of the mettlesome are recreation to play, and there are no parts to "grind" to attain whatever termination of realistic nowness or level. And that mettlesome module hit no metallic farming. Not because it would be impossible, or because of existence threatened with bans, but meet because it wouldn't attain significance to clear somebody added to hit every that recreation for you. The ineffectual rages of mettlesome developers against RMT are rattling meet a alikeness of their possess unfortunate to attain their games recreation in every areas.

Source: Tobold

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MMORPG Addiction - 10 Signs

2008-06-18T12:22:00.001-07:00

With the advent of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), a lot of people have suffered from MMORPG over-addiction, so much so that some of them have slowly confused the real world with the fantasy environment of the games they're playing. I kid you not! This seeming merger of truth and fiction is not restricted to costume plays (or cosplays), sci-fi conventions or game launches. It has extended to everyday life. And if you have been playing a particular MMORPG for hours upon hours, each and every day, you might be suffering from MMORPG over-addiction yourself!

How would you know?

Here are 10 signs that can be observed if ever you have too much MMORPG adrenaline in your system.

1. Whenever you want to buy something, you think in terms of gold instead of dollars. Gold, of course, is the unit of currency in most MMORPG game worlds.

2. Whenever you accomplish a significant deed, you subconsciously expect to level up, coupled with a sound in the background to inform the world of such a feat. MMORPG programs reward players with experience points which can be used to increase their levels.

3. You find yourself speaking in Old English. Quite a number of MMORPG systems require the players to role play their characters as if they're living in a fantastical, medieval world. This includes conversing in Old English. So hear 'ye, hear 'ye, hear 'ye, if thou hath been speaking the tongue of ages yore, thou hath been possessed by the soul of thy machinated character.

4. You start referring to you bag as your inventory. A staple of MMORPG programs is a limited inventory screen that allows your character to carry a certain number of implements.

5. You start describing your irritating acquaintance as a "re-spawning monster." The monsters in all MMORPG systems persistently re-spawn so that players would always have something to kill for some experience points.

6. Whenever an item, like a gadget perhaps or a book, is priced beyond your budget, you start to subconsciously hope that you'll get it soon with a future "drop." In MMORPG programs, monsters drop useful items whenever they're destroyed. Sometimes, they drop some very rare and very valuable items.

7. When ever you need the help of a friend in the real world, you sometimes inform him by screaming "tank!" or "aggro!" The terms tank and aggro are MMORPG-generic words that refer to a variety of support from party members. Tank refers to the act of having someone with higher HP attack a monster first. The monster would focus on such a player, and the other player with lower HP would attack it from behind and claim a majority of the experience points. Aggro refers to a slew of support spells from the magic users of the same adventuring party.

8. At the end of every month, you'd be surprised to discover that you have exhausted all your vacation and sick leaves from work. In South Korea, for example, where MMORPG programs are a huge hit, employers complain of massive employee absences whenever a major game is released. Indeed, an MMORPG has the power to take over your virtual as well as your real life.

9. You spend countless sleepless nights thinking of strategies that would help you build your character, or defeat a seemingly undefeatable boss. FREE MMORPGs programs often require more strategy that what you'd expect, and trying to discover the best tactics that work is part of the fun.

10. Whenever you're planning your monthly budget, you give paramount importance to allotting payment for your MMORPG's subscription. There is no shame here. We're all guilty of the same thing.

Should you start worrying?

Should you begin to consider a change in lifestyle?

Should you consult a therapist?

For as long as the other aspects of your life, which are more important than your need for an MMORPG fix, are not compromised, then your preference for MMORPG programs, whether casual of a product of an addictive tendency, can still be considered as healthy.

But if you start jeopardizing your health, your job, your family and your overall wellbeing, then dude! You have to realize that though an MMORPG offers a world of endless fun, it's just a game, and your life is not.

Source : www.bharatbhasha.com

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New Test Server Patches 6/14

2008-06-17T20:02:00.001-07:00

General

You should no longer do the loot animation while swiming.
The flame on the Torch of Eiglophian will now die after a while.
Now all spells can be casted with dagger and staff without problems.
When you train Basic or Advanced Riding, you will no longer be teleported
Fixed an alignment issue with quest indicators over quest NPC’s heads.
Transition Quest Goal Markers have been updated to fit where the NPC’s now stand.
Locking to raid instances have been fixed. All players participating in a raid will now be locked.
Fixed problem that would cause the resource manager to hang indefinitely if the client consistantly fails to download a resource.
Bonus spell damage now increases both minimum and maximum damage, instead of just maximum (average damage will remain unchanged).
Stat bonuses from items (strength, wisdom, dexterity and constitution) will now properly affect your character (Note that strength now directly affects your DPS, not your attack rating).

GUI

All Assassin abilities which stack multiple times now have a stack count in the buff GUI.
All Bear Shaman, Priest of Mitra, and Tempest of Set abilities which stack multiple times now have a stack count in the buff GUI.

Items

Hood of Jagged Barbs has been revamped.
Polearms should now be the intended size.
Added new purple rare drops to world loot.
Conqueror Spear should now look the right size.
Cimmeria hide light wrist should no longer clip with arms
Changed reference to Steelsilk to Gossamer Silk in the Full Trade Response.
Average, Fair, Fine and Superior Meat will no longer end up in the quest inventory.
Crafting Item: Renamed item “Bloodsilver-studded Boots” to “Bloodsilver-mail Boots”
The purchase price of vendor-bought alchemy reagents are now one third of what they were.
Hek’lar’s Accursed Dagger will now appear with the correct icon in the player’s inventory.
Fixed an issue with ‘Darfari Armbands’, they should be visible on female characters and have stats now.
Crafting Item: Skymetal-studded Wristbands and Bluesteel-studded Wristbands (rare) And should be different from each other.

NPC

Vistrix’ Profanity debuff has been tweaked.
Ice Cave: Ice worms should now attack correctly.
Field of the dead: Dusk wolf should reset properly.
The Acheronian Warlord will drop bossloot armor again.
The trader in Lacheish Plains has been removed as intended.
Toirdealbach should now be a more fun and playable encounter.
The Catacombes: Necromancer Undead should now attack correctly.
The Champion of the Honorguard now uses its correct abilities again.
Ethi woke up with his height a bit smaller than what it was yesturday.
Villa Lentulus: Gurges the Nimble should react normally to players.
Yakhmar’s Cave: Yakhmar should no longer get stuck if it cannot reach its target.
Kyllikki’s Crypt: Kyllikki should reset properly when noone is in her hate list.
Khopshef Province: Freed Rogue Slave should now use his weapons correctly.

Mounts

Revamped translation so the blood is displayed relative to horse as well.
The targetting arrow should now be positioned correctly when targetting a horse, gorilla and Mtilator
You will half your chance of beeing knocked off the horse from the sides. You cannot be knocked off the horse if the attacker is standing in front of you
Monsters lower level than you will have a much lower chance of knocking you off the horse. Monsters higher level than you will have a much higher chance of knocking you off the horse.
Fixed a problem where advanced mount abilities were being given out by the basic training. Mammoth and Rhino owners - Please use /claim again. This will train the attack abilities associated with these two mount types.

Playfields

Purple Lotus Swamp: Ladders should now work correctly.
Tarantia Noble: Players should now be able to teleport into the arena by clicking on the door.
Tarantia Noble: The Arena in Armsman Tavern has been redone. If you are looking for challenging arena fights, you can do so either alone or as part of a group.

Player Cities

Player Cities will now have the Trader NPC now.
The stack-size of building materials has been raised to 1000.

Player Characters

Archetype

New buff counters were added to a number of mage and soldier effects.
All gathering feats should now have the correct proficiency suffix in their name.
The Goad ability can be trained and used on a NPC that does not have aggro on you. You must be in combat to use this ability.
The buffs from rogue general feats Concealment, Distraction and Mountaineer will now be removed from characters when they untrain feats.
You can no longer enter spellweaving when climbing or swimming. If you are hiding or crouching and enter spellweaving, you will leave that state immediately.

Assassin

Flesh Rot now applies a separate debuff for each player Lotus Weapons now now applies a separate debuff for each player.

Bear Shaman

Wreck Armor I+II+III combos now have improved visuals and sound.

Conqueror

You may now use Incite the Ranks if Fire Weave is running.
Throat Slash can now only be used with a melee weapon and not a ranged weapon.

Dark Templar

Soul Barrier’s cast time has been reduced from 3 seconds to 1 second.
Changed the Cooldown of Unhallowed Blight III to 20s.
Changed the Unholy Debuff to be 5% on all combos. - Changed the duration of the debuff to last for 25s.
Reduced the Mana cost of the following spells by 50%:
- Aura of Dread Fury (Ranks 1 - 4)
- Aura of Infusion (Ranks 1 - 5)
- Covenant of Pestilence (Ranks 1 - 4)
- Covenant of War (Ranks 1 - 3)
- Covenant of Death
- Covenant of Invulnerability (Ranks 1 - 3)
- Covenant of Vengeance
- Drain Life (Ranks 1 - 5)

Demonologist

Waves of Flame now inflicts more damage each tick.
The animation for the Demonologist-spell Unholy Hate has been slowed down by 25%.
Resolved an minor issue with Demonologist spellweaving not affecting stamina potion effects.

Herald of Xotli

Resolved a issue with “Blood Pit” so it will always spawn if you successfully kill a minion with the “I Eat Your Heat” combo.

Necromancer

You no longer lose the Cannibalism spell when investing the second feat.
Vile Insight now gives the intended Unholy Specialization as reflected in the description.
Plauged Heart Curse will now correctly increase in damage with more feats trained.
Parasitic Soul Swarm now inflicts more damage each tick.
Pestilential Blast now has an additional skull visual.

Priest of Mitra

Revoled a problem with the priest of mitra spellweaving ability.
Repulse has had its base damage lowered slightly and contribution from bonus magic damage increased.
Cleansing Fire now has a slightly lower manacost and now scales correctly across all levels.
The damage bonus applied to Repulse, Cleansing Fire, and Lance of Mitra from Force of Will has been lowered to the correct amount.
The damage bonus from Improved Repulse has been significantly increased

Ranger

The buffs from ranger stances Shattering Stance, Piercing Stance, Fire Stance and Sniper Stance will now be removed from characters when they untrain feats.

Tempest of Set

Brutal Lightning Strike should no correctly increase the critical strike chance of Lightning Strike.

Tradeskills

Obsidian has been renamed to Feldspar.
Orichalcum has been renamed to Duskmetal.
Tigereye Gems will now end up in the resource inventory.
Skinning Trainer will now tell you were to get skins.
Your harvesting will no longer get interrupted by someone outside of the resource and building playfields.
Resource nodes can now always be harvested while their health is at 10%.
The Weaponsmith Trainer now gives the cooldown warning when the cooldown is in effect.
The dialogues of the Resource Gatherer Trainers and Crafter Trainers now check if the player has the appropriate feats set on them, in addition to quests. If the player has the quest to gather resources or craft, but has lost the feat that enables him to do so, the feat is now retrained (to the correct tier).

Quests

Dealing with Dila: Dila should now attack.
Hunting the Spider: Quest can now be completed.
The Lost Scouts: Waypoint to Dairmad was fixed.
Oasis of Zaara: Waypoints for quest were fixed.
In Defense of Beauty: Quest can be completed now.
Flowers of the Snow: The flowers way markers were adjusted.
Paetus and the Nemedian Crown: Waypoint for Armsman’s Tavern was fixed.
Wanted posters should now give proper feedback if the player already has the quest or does not meet the requirements.
Rahim & Lord Camillus: had it’s journal text modified, as he doesn’t stand near the Armsman’s Tavern.
Death to the Undead: Indicators for minimap were displaying to small. This has been resolved.
The Mark of Acheron: Players will now be able to experience the destiny event in the Field of Chiefs.
The Mark of Acheron: The Mark of Acheron is permanently removed when performing the Medallion Ritual now.
Soul Chamber: If you die in the soul chamber you now lose the tablet in your quest inventory.
Destiny Quest: The quest rewards ‘King Conan’s Tribute’ & ‘King Conan’s Esteem’ are no longer tradeable.
The Lost Bottles: Wine bottles will now have a blue flame indicating you can interact with them.
Tradeskill Quests: You can now delete all tradeskill quests but tradeskill progression quests.
Tradeskill Quests: Resolved various level requirement issues with the quests.

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Age of Conan MMORPG : 1Million Copies

2008-06-15T14:23:00.001-07:00

Funcom is proud to announce that Age of Conan will pass the astounding "One Million Copies Shipped" milestone, in less than three weeks after the launch of the game. Due to overwhelming demand Funcom's retail partner is now re-supplying retail boxes rapidly while also including new markets to the mix. As a result of the tremendous interest from gamers, Age of Conan has for the past few weeks been claiming number one spots on the sales charts across the western world – including the US, Germany, France and the UK – while receiving glowing review scores from gaming media.

"Sales data shows that Age of Conan is the biggest MMORPG launch since World of Warcraft," says Funcom Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Morten Larssen. "The numbers are very promising, and we are very proud to be one of the fastest selling PC games ever in a launch month and the biggest simultaneous Europe/US MMO launch in history."

In the US, Age of Conan has a strong # 1 chart position and is now moving past the 500.000 shipped mark. Meanwhile the attention for the game is growing across the globe, with over 8 million unique visitors from over 200 countries to the Age of Conan websites so far in 2008. The community surrounding the game is also growing fast, with over 800,000 signing up as members of the Clan of Conan fan club.

Age of Conan was launched May 20th in the US and May 23rd in Europe, receiving critical acclaim from media across the globe. "Age of Conan has raised the bar," wrote US gaming website Gamezone, giving the game a score of 94 out of 100. Gamespot, one of the world's leading gaming websites, rewarded Age of Conan a 8,5 score calling it "one of the finest online RPGs available". The game is also receiving acclaim in Europe, where a broad range of early reviews gave an average score of over 90 percent. Funcom is committed to continue to expand and improve on the game by adding more content, features and fixes in order to make Hyboria a favorite place for gamers across the globe, and players can expect some exciting news in the weeks and months ahead.

More information about the game can be found on www.ageofconan.com

About Funcom - Funcom is an independent developer and publisher of online games for PC, consoles and mobile platforms. Funcom has provided outstanding entertainment since 1993 and continues to expand its track-record of more than twenty released games. Recent titles include 'The Longest Journey', 'Anarchy Online' and 'Dreamfall: The Longest Journey'. For corporate information please visit www.funcom.com. For information about Funcom games visit www.anarchy-online.com, www.dreamfall.com, www.darkdaysarecoming.com or www.ageofconan.com. Funcom is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker FUNCOM.

Source : mmorpg-x

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Impact of Activision Blizzard

2008-06-15T14:08:00.001-07:00

The surprise announcement of the impending merger of Activision and Vivendi Games that was announced in December 2007 caused shockwaves throughout the industry that are still being felt now, in mid-2008, as the deal rolls towards completion.

The prospective company (still pending approval for its existence from stockholders and various government agencies) has made even further waves with other recent moves, such upcoming CEO Bobby Kotick floating concepts such as Blizzard being used to push Activision franchises such as Guitar Hero into Asian markets and the decision to leave the Entertainment Software Association (and as a result not taking part in this year's E3).

In this in-depth investigation, Gamasutra will be summarizing the details of the merger and look at their moves since the announcement, with commentary from some of the industry's most respected authorities in their field, including Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter and game attorney Thomas H. Buscaglia.

The Facts of the Deal

Activision and Vivendi announced on Sunday, December 3rd that they had signed definitive agreement to combine Vivendi Games and Activision into a new company, Activision Blizzard, creating "the world's largest pure-play online and console game publisher" -- a claim based on the expectation for an approximate $3.8 billion in pro-forma combined calendar 2007 revenues, the highest operating margin of a major third-party publisher.

Though this claim has been disputed (including here on Gamasutra) it's generally considered that Activision Blizzard will be at least on a par in size with Electronic Arts.

The transaction is still subject to the approval of Activision's stockholders, but has been approved by the European Commission and, of course, the boards of directors of Vivendi, Vivendi Games and Activision.

Under the terms of the announced agreement Vivendi Games is to be "merged with a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision" -- resulting shares of Vivendi Games being converted into 295.3 million new shares of Activision common stock.

Based on the transaction price of $27.50 per share of Activision common stock, this implies a value of approximately $8.1 billion for Vivendi Games.

Concurrently with this merger, Vivendi will purchase 62.9 million newly issued shares of Activision common stock at a price of $27.50 per share for a total of $1.7 billion in cash. As a result of these transactions, Vivendi will own an approximate 52% ownership stake in Activision Blizzard.

Following the completion of the transaction there will be a slight executive shake-up: Robert Kotick will be president and chief executive officer of Activision Blizzard. Bruce Hack, current chief executive officer of Vivendi Games, will serve as vice-chairman and chief corporate officer of Activision Blizzard.

Mike Griffith will serve as president and chief executive officer of Activision Publishing, which is to include the Sierra Entertainment, Sierra Online and Vivendi Games Mobile divisions in addition to the Activision business.

Implying that they intend to "leave well enough alone", Mike Morhaime is to keep his executive position, and continue to serve as president and chief executive officer of Blizzard Entertainment.

Source : mmorpg-x.com

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Blizzard Battles WoW Server Problems

2008-06-10T10:10:00.001-07:00

With six million subscribers, keeping World of Warcraft (WoW) private servers up and running is probably the biggest challenge facing Blizzard. WoW has been plagued by server problems that cause the game to crash without warning. Complaints from angry players have been pouring in about long lag times. Blizzard acknowledged that there is a problem and they've been religiously informing customers about system problems, but players contend that Blizzard has been slow to react to their complaints.

The wow private servers problems have been severe after Blizzard implemented its last major patch to WoW in late March. In an interview with CNET News.com, Evgeney Krevets, a WoW player said, Being a system administrator myself, I have some understanding of what goes on in a corporate data center. I don't know Blizzard's system setup. What I do know is that if I kept performing 'urgent maintenance' and taking the service down without warning for eight-hour periods, I would be out of a job.

To diffuse the ire of millions of subscribers, Blizzard blames its network provider AT&T for some of the problems. Blizzard also argues that massive online games like Wow are simply prone to network issues. Blizzard's official stand: "Due to the complex nature of massively multiplayer games like 'World of Warcraft,' technical issues such as the ones some of our players have experienced recently may occur on occasion. Our commitment to our players is to provide effective solutions as quickly and carefully as possible whenever any such situation occurs.

With no real solution in sight, some players have come to accept that private server problems won't go away and they will just keep playing. While some players wait for Blizzard to resolve the server problem, some try to solve it on their own by choosing other private servers . It seemed to work for them.

But what boggles the mind is even with a slew of multiplayer online games, such as Everquest, City of Heroes, Ultima Online and others, WoW players refuse to walk away from WoW. Blizzard is probably banking on the idea that there is no real alternative to WoW. But with the number of unhappy subscribers increasing every time a server goes down, Blizzard should start to take the problems more seriously.

Source : wow.qj.net

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EVE Online meets Half-Life 2 in machinima masterpiece

2008-06-10T01:19:00.001-07:00

Clear Skies is a groundbreaking machinima produced by Ian Chisholm, which takes place entirely within the galactic setting of EVE Online, known as New Eden. Any attempt to lump Clear Skies in with your run-of-the-mill machinima would be a disservice to the scope of the work; the film clocks in at just under 40 minutes and was a labor of love for two years in the lives of its creators.

Clear Skies follows a trio of down-and-out misfits who've seen no end of bad luck. John Rourke is the obstinate captain of the Clear Skies, a Tempest class battleship manufactured by the downtrodden Minmatar race of New Eden. Rourke's attitude toward his hazardous chosen lifestyle is cavalier, although this does not sit well with his friends among the crew. Solomon Burke is the pessimistic ship's engineer, while Charlie Fodder -- a gunner with an ironic name -- does his best to keep the crew alive. Typical of life in New Eden, Fodder is doomed to remain a rather busy man.

These likeable dropouts from the entrenched corporate lifestyle of New Eden eke out a meager living on trade runs and the odd courier job here and there. Still, they manage to find humor in their grim lot as they narrowly avoid being blown out of the stars by pirates, hired thugs, or whatever threat awaits them on the other side of the next jump gate. This is life aboard the Clear Skies. It's not a comfortable lifestyle by any means, but the crew is free to live and die by their own terms. Of course, their exploits do make for some good stories.

Just back from their last job gone awry, Rourke and crew are faced with a gargantuan repair bill for what's left of the Clear Skies when they dock in the nearest space station they can reach. They have to choose between parting with the Clear Skies or going broke to fix her. They opt to spend all of their isk to resurrect their ship and home, going back to square one in the process, with no choice but to make more shady deals just to continue getting by. The latest of their exploits is to transport 'an idiot in a shiny suit' a few jumps to the Hek solar system. Their passenger, however, wishes to remain anonymous, is paying too much money, and insists upon being ferried in a battleship. These are all omens of a deathtrap, but the crew has little choice but to accept. And so begins the story -- epic by machinima standards -- that exposes the viewer to the seedier aspects of life on New Eden's fringe.

The execution of the film is brilliant; Clear Skies is a hybrid between Half-Life 2's character design and EVE Online's backstory. The ship that is the film's namesake serves as the primary setting for the story; and in some respects acts as another character in the film -- with its quirky malfunctioning systems, familiar EVE-style interfaces, and its Minmatar heritage of looking like 'an explosion in a girder factory'.

That's a running gag throughout Clear Skies. Many of the Minmatar race's ships resemble scrapheaps somehow imbued with great speed, but they look as if they could shake apart at any moment. The adage familiar to so many EVE players, that duct tape is standard issue on any Minmatar ship, is alive and well in Clear Skies.

The film is punctuated with humor from start to finish, much of which borders on inside jokes for fans of EVE Online -- little rewards for knowing and being part of the system that is the machinima's backdrop.

Clear Skies stands as a significant work in a number of ways. Looking beyond the intense time commitment involved with producing something of this caliber, the film has found nearly universal acceptance among EVE Online's often divisive community. If fact, there's been little but echoes of praise for Clear Skies on the game's forums by Chisholm's newfound fanbase.

This is surprising, since Clear Skies breaks from the established background in EVE by removing the concept of a capsuleer who controls the essential systems onboard the ship, instead turning the reigns over to the crew itself. Chisholm takes the more accessible angle of having the pilots man the bridge, engine room and gunnery station, but this is an altered perspective for anyone accustomed to EVE Online's gameplay. The battleship in Clear Skies is no longer an extension of one's self, which is a core idea in EVE Online. While this would threaten to be sacrilege to some of EVE Online's more dedicated fans of the backstory, the positive reception to Chisholm's project shows that he made the right choices. Even the developers at CCP Games have congratulated Chisholm and his friends on the achievement.

And those friends certainly deserve some mention as well. The character of Solomon Burke is voiced by Richie Powles, while Charlie Fodder's voice is provided by John Guthrie. What's interesting here is that they've now taken roleplay in EVE to new heights; the characters that Chisholm, Powles, and Guthrie portray are also their own characters in-game. The trio of characters are all members of Pure Alliance, and can be found in their respective corporations of The Wild Hunt (Rourke) and Dawn of a New Empire (Powles and Guthrie).

Ian Chisholm has stated that a sequel to Clear Skies is being planned, largely due to the fan response to his effort, which he found simply overwhelming. He never expected interest in his machinima to hit the levels it has so far, thus a website for Clear Skies wasn't in place for the film's release. But this hasn't prevented the film from being seen by thousands of viewers willing to track it down. In lieu of a dedicated website for the project, which Chisholm assures is already in the works, the film is being distributed through a loose network of fansites. The most comprehensive collection of links to date related to Clear Skies was put together by a fan on the EVE forums. The most popular place to download Clear Skies is at the fan-run site EVE Files, which is hosting the film's trailer as well as the full version. An embedded version of the film is currently offered at LivePvP.

Despite the fact that Clear Skies is set in the EVE Online universe, the film is accessible to virtually any fan of machinima or the sci-fi genre as a whole. Check out what all the hype is about; Clear Skies won't disappoint.

Source : massively.com

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The end of the age of the amateur game designer?

2008-06-10T01:02:00.001-07:00

NCSoft's first quarter report came out, and they don't want to talk about their space marine-fps-mmo, Tabula Rasa, except to say they are fairly disappointed bu its performance.

I should refer to it by its full name, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa.

Richard Garriott, if you don't know of him, is "the legendary video game programmer and designer, noted as one of the PC Gamer's "Game Gods". I found this little tidbit on a vanity web site called "Richard in Space", where you can meet Richard Garriott as he prepares for his space tourist flight to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Last year, Game God Brad McQuaid was likewise absent for the disappointment that was Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I'm sure he was as well paid as Richard Garriott, AKA the sixth Earth human to go to the space station as a tourist. We could be next, gushes the "Richard in Space" site. Maybe if we can get someone to shovel money at us because our Game God status demands it.

I feel sad for the people who did their best to finish these games while the Gods got all the press and the limelight. All the real developers got were schedules, pressure, disappointment and exciting trips to the unemployment office.

Now Brad is in hiding, and Richard Garriott is going up to space (still unknown: did he leave a clone behind in case he wanted to respec? Or in case the Soyuz castle lands just a little *too* hard this time?).

Past success is no indicator of future success in this world. Maybe it makes a difference if you put as much as yourself into the next game as you did in the one that made you a Game God. I think you really have to step back and reassess your life if you find yourself being promoted as a Game God. Hey, you could say, don't call me that. I'm no better than anyone else. I had a hit game but all I have to show for it is that I have to work twice as hard on the next one.

John Romero, American McGee, Brad McQuaid, Richard Garriott and many, many more; Game Gods all.

Source : westkarana.com

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Free Online Games know-how

2008-06-09T09:34:00.001-07:00

When Frooga.com was lunched 3 years ago it only had 50 free online games, as the years passed and free online gaming became more and more popular than ever, they kept adding new games to the site and now it currently has over 600 games. Since 2003 many gaming sites have came out and the only thing you need to do is type in the word "free online games" in Google or Yahoo and you'll find 100s of them. But the unique thing about Frooga.com is that they won't spam your brower with pop-ads or make you sign-up after playing couple of games on their site. No. When you play games at Frooga.com it's only games and nothing else, it's simple as that.

All their free online games are hand selected from different games developers and updated on Frooga.com. So you won't find any boring games there.

They have wide selection of different online games, online action games, online puzzle games, sports, dress them up, online shooting games and many others.

With Frooga.com you don't download any software to play the games you only need to have a good browser like Interent Explorer, FireFox, Safari and many other plus Flash Player 9 or above and you are set.

If you haven't played any online games before it's real easy and most of their online games come with insturction on how to play them. So check them out and leave a comment here for other people about what you think of their free online games.

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Fallen Earth: Skills Update

2008-06-07T12:20:00.001-07:00

Fallen Earth's lead designer, Lee Hammock, delivered this week an up-to-date skill sets list, covering the Active Skills, Tradeskills, Mutation Paths and the Faction Specialties. Hammock also noted that the team is finishing four major areas in addition to raids and vehicles in preparation for some polish work next week:

As promised last week, I'm going to go through some of the older information and note things that have changed, starting this week with skills. Things have shifted around a bit, mainly with some skills being removed or their purposes switched.

For those who are keeping up on the weekly goings on in the office, this week we're finishing up Boneclaw, Sunshine Corners, Terance, Kingman Prison, and South Burb, in addition to some work on raids, vehicles, etc. Next week is a polish week so we're working on making everything run a bit more smoothly as opposed to implementing more content.

Skills

Currently FE has three categories of skills: Active skills, Tradeskills, and Mutation Paths.

Active Skills

These are skills that are involved in normal, non-mutation based combat, using items, and interacting with the environment. All players have some rating in all the active skills. Active skills start out equal to .75 of one attribute and .25 of a second attribute. For example, a character's base Melee is equal to .75 of their Strength and .25 of their Coordination. Active skills are raised at a cost of 1 AP per point up to double the base value of the skill.

- Animal Training: Allows for the training of horses currently, but other functionality will be added later. Animal Training is based on .75 Charisma and .25 Perception.

- Armor Use: Allows the character to learn defensive special abilities, use a wider selection of armor, and is factored into determining how effective a character's armor is when the character is damaged. Armor Use is based on .75 Strength and .25 Endurance.

- Athletics: Allows the character to learn a variety of self-buff effects, such as increasing movement rates or hit point recovery. Athletics is based on .75 Endurance and .25 Coordination.

- Dodge: When a character is attacked in ranged combat, the target's Dodge skill is compared to the attacker's Rifle or Pistol to determine critical hit chance, damage bonuses, etc. Dodge is determined by .75 Coordination and .25 Perception.

- First Aid: Allows the character to use a number of healing items and special abilities, such as recovering Health over time, restoring Stamina, or removing poison and disease effects. First Aid is based on .75 Intelligence and .25 Perception.

- Group Tactics: Allows the character to use a number of group buffs. Group Tactics is based on .75 Charisma and .25 Perception.

- Melee: Determines effectiveness of melee combat, including chance of critical hits, weapon selection, and special attacks. Melee is based on .75 Strength and .25 Coordination. Melee has a subskill called Melee Defense which is equal to a character's Melee, but may be modified separately by effects, items, etc. When a character is attacked, the character's Melee Defense is compared to the attacker's Melee to determine the chance of critical hit, any damage bonus, etc.

- Pistol: Determines effectiveness of pistols in combat, including chance of critical hits, weapon selection, and special attacks. Pistol is based on .75 Dexterity and .25 Perception. Pistols don't have the range of rifles, but can be used in close combat without penalty.

- Rifle: Determines effectiveness of rifles in combat, including chance of critical hits, weapon selection, and special attacks. Rifle is based on .75 Dexerity and .25 Perception. Rifles have the longest range but characters suffer a penalty to Melee Defense while wielding a rifle.

- Stealth: Determines character's ability to avoid detection via noise and learn a number of effects and special attacks, including the ability to alter your faction ratings (and reveal those alterations in others). Stealth is based on .75 Coordination and .25 Perception.

Tradeskills

These skills allow players to craft items by learning instructions (our new term replacing "recipes"), collecting the appropriate tool kits and components, and spending the required time to make the item. Characters can learn as many tradeskill as they want. All Tradeskills are based on .75 Intelligence and .25 Perception. Tradeskills are raised through use, up to double the base value of the skill.

- Armorcraft: Covers the making of armor and clothes.

- Ballistics: Covers the creation of rifles and pistols, from zip guns and crossbows to sub-machine guns and assault rifles.

- Cooking: Covers the preparation of food, which can provide a number of recovery-oriented buffs.

- Geology: Allows the player to harvest minerals from mining nodes and to refine metals into higher-grade components.

- Medicine: Covers the creation of all manner of medical equipment.

- Mutagenics (formerly Genetics): Covers the creation of mutation injectors and other devices that support the use of mutations, such as gamma restorers.

- Nature: Allows the character to harvest components from animals and plants in addition to producing some items and refine some components.

- Scavenging: Allows the character to harvest scavenging nodes, which can yield a wide variety of items.

- Science: Covers the creation of chemical boosters, special optics, and similarly advanced items. Also allows the refinement of some components.

- Weaponry: Covers the creation of melee weapons.

You may notice the Teaching skill is no longer included. The functionality still exists, but is contained within in each skill instead of a separate skill. So if you learn an advanced Armorcraft knowledge, you can make a book that can teach it to someone else.

Mutation Paths

Each mutation path covers a specific type of mutation and allows the player to learn special abilities within that mutation. Mutation paths are raised with APs, with each AP raising the mutation path 1 point, up to double the base value of the skill.

- Alpha Mutation: Fairly low-power mutations possessed by all characters as part of the cloning process. They provide some basic buffs, recovery abilities, and speed modifiers.

- Empathic: The character can alter the bodies of others, allowing a limited ability to heal or harm others. Empathic is primarily a healing and buffing mutation. Empathic is based on .75 Endurance and .25 Willpower.

- Enhancement: The character can nudge the molecular structure and properties of some common items, exaggerating the already present chemical properties of an item. Enhancement is primarily a crowd-control and damage mutation. Enhancement is based on .75 Intelligence and .25 Willpower.

- Nano-Manipulation: The character can control some of the nanites left on their bodies from the regeneration process, allowing them to increase their own abilities. Nano-Manipulation is primarily a self-buff mutation with a few attack abilities. Nano-Manipulation is based on .75 Intelligence and .25 Willpower.

- Patho-Transmission: The character is a walking plague carrier, and can use these infections to attack others. Patho-Transmission is primarily a debuff and damage-over-time mutation. Patho-Transmission is based on .75 Endurance and .25 Willpower.

- Primal: The character has developed genetic traits he can use to increase his strength, speed, etc. Primal is primarily a self-buff mutation path. Primal is based on .75 Strength and .25 Willpower.

- Sonic Manipulation: The character can control sound waves, reducing or increasing sound. Sonic Manipulation has many facets including buffs, crowd control, and damage abilities, but is not as focused as other mutation paths. Sonic Manipulation is based on .75 Perception and .25 Willpower.

- Suppression: Suppression allows a character to drain gamma energy from other mutations, remove mutation buffs, and increase his own resistance to mutations. Suppression is based on .75 Perception and .25 Willpower.

- Telekinesis: The character can move objects with his mind. Telekinesis is primarily a damage and crowd-control mutation. Telekinesis is based on .75 Intelligence and .25 Willpower.

- Telepathy: The character can affect the minds of others, such as distracting opponents or making himself seem more likable. Telepathy is primarily a crowd-control and self-buffing mutation. Telepathy is based on .75 Charisma and .25 Willpower.

- Thermal Manipulation: The player can control the movement of molecules, increasing or decreasing heat in an area. Thermal Manipulation is primarily a damage, damage-over-time, and self-buff mutation. Thermal Manipulation is based on .75 Perception and .25 Willpower. Faction Skill Specialties

Each faction has nine skills they excel at and ten skills they are average at. To learn skills besides these nineteen skills, faction members must seek out instructors from allied factions or neutral instructors. You'll notice Scavenging isn't on any of these lists; it has no instructions or special abilities associated with it. It only serves to meet requirements for scavenging nodes.

Enforcers:

- Primary Skills: Armor Use, Armorcraft, Ballistics, Dodge, First Aid, Group Tactics, Pistols, Rifles, Suppression

- Secondary Skills: Animal Training, Athletics, Empathic, Geology, Medicine, Melee, Nano-Manipulation, Science, Stealth, Weaponry

Techs:

- Primary Skills: Armorcraft, Ballistics, Enhancement, Mutagenics, Geology, Nano-Manipulation, Pistol, Science, Thermal Manipulation

- Secondary Skills: Armor Use, Dodge, First Aid, Medicine, Rifles, Sonic Manipulation, Suppression, Telekinesis, Telepathy, Weaponry

Travelers:

- Primary Skills: Cooking, Athletics, Dodge, Melee, Pistol, Science, Sonic Manipulation, Stealth, Telepathy

- Secondary Skills: Armor use, Armorcraft, Ballistics, Enhancement, Geology, First Aid, Nano-Manipulation, Nature, Rifle, Weaponry

CHOTA:

- Primary Skills: Armor Use, Athletics, Dodge, Melee, Mutagenics, Patho-Transmission, Primal, Thermal Manipulation, Weaponry

- Secondary Skills: Animal Training, Armorcraft, Cooking, Empathic, Nature, Group Tactics, Pistol, Rifle, Stealth, Suppression

Vista:

- Primary Skills: Animal Training, Athletics, Cooking, Dodge, Nature, Primal, Rifle, Sonic Manipulation, Stealth

- Secondary Skills: Ballistics, Armorcraft, Weaponry, First Aid, Geology, Group Tactics, Medicine, Melee, Pistol, Science

Lightbearers:

- Primary Skills: Dodge, Empathic, First Aid, Mutagenics, Medicine, Melee, Stealth, Telekinesis, Telepathy

- Secondary Skills: Armorcraft, Athletics, Group Tactics, Nature, Primal, Science, Sonic Manipulation, Suppression, Thermal Manipulation, Weaponry

Source : WarCry Network

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Warhammer imbalance fears

2008-06-07T11:58:00.001-07:00

When Warhammer Online releases later this year do you think there will be a skewed realm population? The GREENSkin blog seems to think so, but history would disagree with them. Whenever a game has been faction-based the "evil" races tend to be popular during the beta period. This fear of imbalance was a issue in Dark Age of Camelot and in World of Warcraft. During both of those instances beta testers expressed worry that the more evil of the realms would be entirely overpopulated post launch. However, the exact opposite happened to the complete befuddlement of beta testers everywhere.

Everyone was left wondering why this had happened but the truth is that there's no simple explanation. It's not simply a matter of players liking the good guys more than the bad ones, as many would guess. In the case of World of Warcraft, many players would also argue that Alliance 1-60 content was simply paced much better than the Horde side. Of course with WoW there was only one class specific to each side (Paladin and Shaman) until a patch much later. In Warhammer Online each side has a bevy of classes all to their own. While all of these classes share similarities mechanically, they do differ in terms of flavor. So you can see how even these two games have different factors affecting realm balance.

That's only scratching the surface as there are lots of worries to have with any MMO beyond even realm balance. There's even the possibility that players coming from WoW to WAR might decide to break tradition and flood the evil races over the good ones. All we know is that we'll be in the thick of it playing our Gobbos, Orcs, Chaos and Dark Elves.

Source : Massively.com

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Age of Conan: Upcoming Changes

2008-06-05T17:01:00.001-07:00

Demonologists * The duration of Protection of Set will be substantially increased. * The maximum damage absorbed before Protection of Set fails will be increased to be more in line with damage dealt in leveling scenarios. Additional survivability increases are also being evaluated. * Players will gain a visible debuff to indicate when Protection of Set has run out of absorbable damage. * The base splash damage dealt by Fires of Gehenna, Hellfire Stream, Shockstrike, and Shock will be substantially increased. * The amount of damage dealt by most damage sources will be reevaluated. * The cooldown of Inferno of Ahmner and Shockblast will be reduced to 2.5 seconds to match the casting time of Fires of Gehenna and Shockstrike. * The Archmage feat will be moved to tier 2 instead of tier 3 in the Mage general tree to make it more easily accessible to varying builds. * All crowd control will have a significantly reduced chance to break from damage dealt by pets. * Fiery Torment (Rank 1) will be introduced at level 30 instead of level 45. * The casting time of certain long-duration buffs will be reduced. * The run speed of pets will be increased significantly. * Various bugfixes and alterations to existing feats and abilities; for example, decreasing the casting time of Detonation.

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Online games know-how !

2008-06-01T18:23:00.001-07:00

Online gaming is a new era of the evolution of technology and with the rising demand of different ways to spend our leisure time and with the increase in demand for our services in the working environment. Online gaming is among the most interesting and modern way of entertainment according most of the surveys done worldwide. Many people from all age groups indulge themselves in online game to refresh their minds as well as educate themselves at the same time. Online games are the games played on the computers by the means of internet connection. As the number of internet users is increasing the number of online gamers is also increasing. Games range from the simplest to the most complex depending on the type of game that pleases you. One of the most interesting things about online games is use of graphics and virtual worlds populated by many players simultaneously.There are different kinds of game that are found online which include adventure games , castle building, jet fighting, puzzle games , mind games, pools and many more. These are just some of the games mostly found free online what you need to do is clicking your mouse. Fascinatingly all these games target people from all ages and does not leave anyone out of the loop. The rising of its popularity is due to the perfection of the games with the revolution of internet where websites could stream out videos, audio and a whole new set of user interactivity.

Among the benefit of the online gaming is that it broaden and widens the thinking capacity of people with games such as scrabble which involves thinking and being creative. Problem solving has been known to improve the brain function in its speed and function. While spending time on internet multiplayer games and online gaming communities, players get an opportunity to strengthen existing relationships and at the same time meet new and different people online. With this it promotes social interactions with people who might be very far and still play a game of chess together on the internet.

There is also a potential possibility for online games to help people and families to deal with chronic diseases and other illness that involve the mind. Since games are easier to understand than books then most of schools use online gaming as a way to educate people especially children. From fighting cancer cells to managing pain free online games allow families to use imagination and creativity, while also opening doors to the chance of recovery and understanding.

Let us not forget the prizes to be won after winning the games. Some of the website encourage people to place by awarding prizes to the winners of the games. All this is due to the increase of technology that has also helped in lifting the living standards of our lives. This is a new era that has to be exploited and spread all over for more effectiveness on people. Take a step forward and you will never regret.

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Maple reaps over $29 million in US virtual item sales

2008-06-01T17:36:00.001-07:00

2007 proved to be a good year for Nexon in the United States, particularly with its free-to-play MapleStory. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that the although the game has 85 million users worldwide, only 5.9 million of them are U.S. players.
Given the relatively small percentage of its player base located in the United States, it's surprising that MapleStory made an absolute killing on in-world transactions in 2007; the WSJ reports that 'Nexon's U.S. revenue last year more than tripled to $29.3 million from $8.5 million the prior year.'
Jeremy Liew provides some additional commentary on the Nexon windfall over at Lightspeed: "With $30m in US sales and 6m US registered users, assuming a 20% "active player" rate and 10% "buyer rate", that implies an ARPU of $20/mth which sounds about right and is consistent with number we've seen from games in Asia. It sounds like the US will be following very similar models of virtual goods monetization that we've seen in Asia." It's interesting that the predominantly Asian business model of legitimized RMT is already gaining some degree of acceptance in the United States, albeit a slow acceptance.
Source : massively.com

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Age of Conan dethrones GTA IV in Europe

2008-06-01T17:23:00.001-07:00

With the amount of hype, advertising, positive reviews and media attention Grand Theft Auto IV has received over the past few months, we wholly expected it to remain on top of the software sales charts until our video game consoles grew sentient and attempted to purge humanity from the planet. Strangely enough, a dark horse recently overtook Rockstar's well-received crime drama in many European territories -- a horse mounted by a brawny, rippling Cimmerian.

Yes, Funcom's decapitation-rich MMORPG Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures recently outsold GTA IV in a number of European locations, including Germany and Sweden.
Since Rockstar's latest opus is still selling like freshly baked hotcakes in North America, we can't help but wonder if GTA's themes of living the American dream and hooker brutalization got lost in translation as the title crossed the Atlantic -- or whether Age of Conan's musclebound mascot reminds German gamers of a certain pop culture icon who is quite revered in their country.
Source : massively.com

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Battlestar Galactica fans in EVE Online ?

2008-06-01T08:48:00.001-07:00

EVE Online has made first contact with a whole new group of sci-fi fans, through some carefully chosen TV advertising. EVE's first TV ads were shown during the most recent Battlestar Galactica episode on the SciFi network. If CCP Games wanted to target the viewers who would be the most receptive to checking out EVE, they didn't go wrong by choosing Galactica fans. The TV ads were an unexpected move, and came as a big surprise to many EVE players. Ethic at Kill Ten Rats said: "My jaw hit the floor while watching the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica on SciFi tonight. There, before my eyes, was a commercial for EVE Online. Amazing. Nice work CCP!"
High visibility TV adverts for an MMO had previously been something only associated with Night Elf mohawks, Shatner, and a company with some rather deep pockets. EVE Online dev CCP Wrangler made a full announcement about the company's leap into prime time advertising.
"For the first time ever, EVE Online can be seen on TV! A revised version of the Empyrean Age teaser trailer will be run during the last few episodes of Battlestar Galactica starting tonight! It will run six times total, four times during "prime time" shows and twice during "late night" shows (after 2300 local time). Check local listings for availability and times."
This is a great move on CCP's part, but no doubt an expensive one. However the steady progression made by CCP Games, seen over the relatively short time since this Massively writer joined the ranks of New Eden's capsuleers, is impressive: A merger with White Wolf Publishing and a second gothic horror MMO in the works; quarterly economic newsletters and E-ON magazine issues; in-world journalism and collaborative fiction; a player-elected representative council; EVE TV; and live broadcasts of PvP tournaments. The Icelandic innovators are clearly willing to take some risks by breaking out of the MMO industry's status quo, and co-opting fans from another sci-fi IP is just one bold move among many by CCP. With any luck, the Empyrean Age teaser trailer will be enough to tempt diehard Galactica fans to put that search for Earth on pause and finally check out this 'New-fracking-Eden.'

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Real-to-Virtual Transaction: New Entreprenuers Make a Virtual Fortune

2008-05-31T08:38:00.001-07:00

There is a new virtual market that has emerged in the 21st century that allows gamers to profit from their passion of MMORPGs. Earning money from massively multiplayer online roleplaying games has become a profitable industry that has provided great wealth for individuals from all walks of life. Whilst some disregard it as a fad amongst the technorati, others recognize the potential of this very viable business model. The "virtual warehouse" of workers is immense, with the working population of thousands in the People's Republic of China working alongside the millions of avid MMORPG gamers.
Real-Money Trading is rarely discussed by the international press and so it remains an unknown property to the majority of the world's population. Nevertheless this phenomenon exists in most MMORPG titles including World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI (FFXI), EVE Online and EverQuest 2. This can be shown in EVE where gamers progress through various PvE and PvP situations in order to fill their pockets with the game's currency. Many gamers decide to spend their hard-earned currency on themselves, but some decide to approach the task like a business, utilizing any means necessary to bolster their reserves of currency and sell it on for real cash.
You may ask why the developers of MMORPGs dislike and even actively deter real-money trading. Intellectual property infringement is the most commonly given reason for objection by gaming companies, but there are also accusations of hacking, scamming and phishing within the industry. Developers often try to persuade players within the game that the practice is detrimental to game-play or the world's economy. Legally, real-money trading breaks no laws and has led to no convictions within the Western world, but pressure for government intervention grows each day.
Even though some take issue with the ethics or principles of the practices, virtual trading is here to stay. Opportunity is not just limited to the USA and Europe; countries such as South Korea and Japan also have vibrant RMT industries. A bright future lies ahead with new opportunities available in yet unreleased titles, the most promising of which being Age of Conan.
Written and distributed by www.MOGS.com - providers of FFXI Gil

The Lucrative Environment of Virtual Business

2008-05-31T08:34:00.001-07:00

Playing video games for a living is the fantasy of thousands of gamers across the wold, but in this internet age it is fantasy no longer. Benefiting financially from massively multiplayer online roleplaying games has become a profitable industry that has provided great wealth for individuals from all walks of life. Those competing in the real-money trading industry include dedicated professionals to part-time players, big-city businesses to the bedroom entrepreneur. Employing thousands of workers across Asia is necessary to satisfy the growing demand from Western gamers.
Little press attention is given to this explosive industry and thus investment is often hard to come by for new companies. Regardless of this, RMT remains most active in games such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, EverQuest and EVE, to name a few. This can be shown in the World of Warcraft where participants compete through quests, grinding and other in-game tasks in order to acquire piles of the game's currency. Most blow their fortune within the game's stores or marketplace, but many decide to sell their precious Gil for real money - others even dedicate themselves (and others) professionally to this task, all in the search of profit.
The legitimacy of this practice is an ambiguous issue, but it is clear that many gamers and executives alike disapprove. Intellectual property infringement is the most commonly given reason for objection by gaming companies, but there are also accusations of hacking, scamming and phishing within the industry. Some also accuse RMT companies of overloading games with workers, which serves to dilute the population of real gamers and negatively affect the game as a whole. In South Korea, however, this is not seen as an issue and the practice is seized upon by both developer and player alike.
Developers such as Funcom have pushed passed the problems and seen nothing but opportunity for legitimized RMT. The bottom line for many is that there is money to be made, and the industry is continuing to grow. With the introduction of new titles to the genre and increase in gaming population, this industry is certainly one to watch, whether as an investor, opportunist or admiring onlooker.
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Age of Conan: Early Impressions

2008-05-30T02:34:00.001-07:00

The character creation screen is more in depth than many MMOs. However, if you're brave enough to admit you've played The Sims, then you've certainly seen better. In the end does it really matter in games where you're likely to be covered head to toe in armor? I think not so much but I sense that people do enjoy the versatility. What I would personally have preferred more than being able to tweak the length of my nose or the size of my boobs, was not to look like a ragamuffin. If you thought your character's gear looked thrown together in LOTRO you ain't seen nothin' yet. To date, Age of Conan and LOTRO are the only games that I've played where I looked like mixed-match mess.

I appreciate the circumstance of a recently escaped/freed slave. I understand they don't plan on making the game as gear dependant as others. However, do I really have to look that bad? Or am I that vain??? I found myself looking through the multiple tops, pants and shoes in my bag trying to find something that at least seemed like it went together. The stats were all the same but the styles, colors and textures didn't jive. I looked a hot mess. It was slightly similar to AC2 in that, there was a lot of variety in the same piece of armor so you can be in a red robe that has +1 Defense and I can be in a black one if I prefer and that's without dying your items. However, Age of Conan hacks made the stuff even at the lower levels look decent and you could easily match your items. Hopefully, I'll get to look better at some point.

AOC has a nice variety of classes within the four archetypes of Soldier, Priest, Mage and Assassin. Only certain classes can be played by certain races, which is a common implementation. However, in AOC whole archetypes are exclusive to certain races. For example, if you want to be a Mage of any kind, then you must be Stygian. On the PVE and PVP servers so what, but I wonder how this plays out on the Culture PVP servers where a race is completely locked out of an archetype?

Even though AOC has the usual suspects for classes, not all of them are the typical fare. Priests and Mages are battle versions of those classes. Everyone gets to have decent offensive skills and from what I've read so far, it appears that HOT and AOE healing spells are more prevalent than the "heal one" scenario. I think this might make playing a healer more pleasurable. If you can heal many more often with a single action, you'll have more opportunity to actual watch the battle – see the instances and bosses.

One of the Mage's has melee as its primary DPS, as does at least one of the Priests. It's little twists like these that add a bit of freshness into the game. I'll discuss the classes in more detail after I've finished testing my would-be mains.

Lastly, the combat system which is VERY different from any MMO I've ever played. At least in terms of PVE, it's not giving me nearly the trouble I expected. I never did well on the console games and don't consider myself adept at FPS style combat but so far, so good. The inclusion of combos which deal more damage when successfully executed is interesting. I do wish that I could move where they displayed. For some reason focusing left side of the screen doesn't work as well for me, as it would if I could place it right side or better yet, closer to my character and my Age of Conan cheats. I want to watch the combat but with the combos slightly off to the left, my eye is focused there. Oh well, definitely not a huge deal. It would just be nice to be able to move it to match my preferred field of view.

That's where I'm at for now. It's pretty, different, combat feels fresh, UI could be better but no deal breaker. I'm on a PVE server at the moment. I'm going to do a Bear Shaman on a PVP or Cultural PVP server at some point. The only pitfall I can foresee at the moment is if I MUST quest. Forced questing for leveling is why I'm not playing LOTRO or EQ2. Grinding XP is a play-style and as much as some people hate it, others enjoy and actually prefer it. I don't mind questing in moderation but when I'm not in the mood, I really do need the freedom to just go whack stuff and still level at a decent rate. This philosophy is one of the major reasons I'm excited about Warhammer Online.

May 29, 2008 in Age of Conan | Permalink

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Champions Online: Ankylosaur

2008-05-29T02:33:00.001-07:00

He was born into a poor family, and no one really understood him. He got kicked out of school because of a simple misunderstanding about what he and the principal's daughter were doing in the broom closet. He was tossed into juvie for a couple of burglaries and some joyriding - a luckier kid would have gotten a slap on the wrist.

Nothing ever turned out right. But Paul was convinced that he was due for a big score to make up for all his rotten luck.

He got his chance when the local VIPER nest hired Paul and his friends to help out with a job. Paul knew this was his shot at the big time - if he got in good with VIPER, he'd be on the road to Easy Street.

The job was easy - make a lot of noise and smash some stuff outside of one of UNTIL's research centers, so a VIPER team could infiltrate the facility and loot it. It should have been a piece of cake - except UNTIL's security hit Paul and his buddies fast and hard.

Paul panicked and ran into the research center instead of away from it. He found himself in some sort of warehouse, hiding behind piles of crates. As a joke - and since he didn't have anything better to do besides pray he didn't get caught - Paul pulled out a pen and wrote his own address on some of the shipping labels. Then as the sounds of battle faded, Paul snuck away and counted himself fortunate to be alive.

To his amazement, a few days later a delivery truck pulled up outside his apartment and dropped off several huge crates! Paul eagerly opened them, hoping to find something he could sell. Instead, he found a shiny suit of powered armor styled to look like some sort of dinosaur. It was his lucky day!

It took Paul a few days to figure out how to put the battlesuit together and operate it - just in time for a squad of UNTIL agents to show up looking for the missing prototype Ankylosaur armor. A few grenades and some power smashes later, and Paul had trashed the UNTIL team. He was a supervillain!

About Ankylosaur

Ankylosaur is a supercriminal for hire - sometimes he works for other villains; sometimes he pulls off his own jobs. He may not win every time, but his life is a lot better now than it used to be.

He is a bully and a thug, and he likes to have power and a fat wad of cash in his pocket. The Ankylosaur armor gives him those things. But Ankylosaur isn't a big thinker - it took him months to learn how to pronounce the armor's name properly - and he's impressed by those who are, making him an easy recruit for masterminds looking for muscle.

Ankylosaur has a major hatred of authority figures, and he'll take any opportunity to smash police officers or UNTIL agents, even if he's in the middle of a job. If he's ever in a jam and needs to grab a hostage, he'll go for someone who looks "official" every time.

Lately, though, the Ankylosaur armor is starting to show some age, so he's looking to hook up with some brains that can give him an upgrade. Better armor, bigger weapons - the cops won't stand a chance.

Source : WarCry

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Online Game communities are social in nature

2008-05-28T09:22:00.001-07:00

By Cindy Ahuna

Who are the friendly characters that will play with you if you play with them?

In 1969, "SpaceWar", developed by Rick Blomme, was the first two-player game designed to play on PLATO. In 1961, the "Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations" was the first network to run on the Illiac computer system. PLATO was created by Professor Chalmers Sherwin, under the direction of electrical engineering professor Don Bitzer, co-inventor of the plasma display pane at the University of Illinois.

During 1970 through 1977, multiplayer games included "SpaceWar"; a version of "Star Trek"; "Avatar", a Dungeons and Dragons-style game; "Airflight", a flight simulator; and "Empire", which supported 32 players on PLATO. In 1972, PLATO hosted 1,000 simultaneous users. In May 2001, Sony's "EverQuest", a massive multiplayer online role-playing game, hosted 60,000 to 80,000 players daily.

In 1973, David R. Woolley designed "Notes", a communications software for PLATO. Due to the release of this software, "Talkomatic", precursor to IRC with handles and chat rooms, was developed for PLATO. A maximum of five people wrote and read each other's messages on the same screen. Chat rooms were open and uncensored. A player logged on using their real or an anonymous name, and played either gender role.

In various online chat rooms found on AOL's games and in Sony's "EverQuest", text is censored when gamers use brand or offensive words. Role-playing genders, sometimes referred to as gender swapping or multiple representations, is possible when gamers change or hide the genders of their characters using anonymous names.

In "EverQuest", with more than 360,000 subscribers, thousands of gamers play characters of the opposite gender. Gamers are free to explore relationships while in character. Male gamers find that female characters generally get treated better in male-dominated virtual worlds. Sometimes men find it easier to chat with other characters and escape the competition. In free online games list, multiple representations allow players to see how other players solve problems. "There are a lot of rumors and anecdotes about people referring to play games as men or women because they are treated differently," says avid gamer J. MacLean.

In a lecture titled "Programs, Emotions and Common Sense", Marvin Minsky emphasized in his book the idea of multiple representation. "If you understand something very precisely in one way", Minsky claims "you don't understand it at all." "You know it by rote. What does the word understand mean? Understanding means having many different ways to deal with things," said Minsky. Children memorize history by rote, but they usually don't understand it how free online games work. Sometimes gamers falsely assume they are interacting with a person who matches the gender's name. Perhaps on one level, Minsky's definition can be applied as a working analogy for multiplayers who role-play playing games. If multiplayers had more ways of identifying the characters, they might be able to understand who the friendly characters were when they played with them, but then again, that might take all of the fun out of the game.

Artist/curator Anne-Marie Schleiner, describes social developments in gaming: "Multiplayer games can be very social. In the shooter genre, players sometimes band together into "clans", groups who fight against other groups. Sometimes the social bonds developed in these clans extend beyond the game into friendship and players offer each other moral support through personal hardship and help each other find jobs," said Schleiner.

Social environments evolve from online game communities. "A great example is "Air Warrior", a WW2 flight simulation with players are so dedicated, they've held conventions. Massive multiplayer role-playing games are also famous for the strength of their communities "the guilds in "EverQuest" are a great example of this phenomenon," says MacLean. In contrast to single player games, communities are vital depending on the game. For example, "for a game like chess, where skill levels can be critical, many people prefer to play with someone of relatively similar skill," says MacLean.

In a global point of view, the Internet is the living organism that hosts many online games systems. Boundaries of geography, economy, culture, degrees of education and family traditions have disappeared. Gamers are co-authors that take part in the experience. Communities are playing fields for social interaction. When gamers send messages to other gamers, they are free to exchange email addresses and meet beyond the game community. Communities have become an extension, a new medium of human touch.

When communities form, a semantic world of sharing knowledge, solving problems, working as a team, playing, building, quarreling, cooperating, planning and forming relationships develop. Games are formal because they have a set of rules. A game is a system because it has a collection of parts that interact with each other in complex ways. In "EverQuest", the Game Masters hold the most power. Online games run on a '24x7' calendar. Generally, online the role-playing games are maintained by paid subscriptions, whereas, online fighting games are free. Communities exist in time by free and paid subscriptions. Gamers occupy real estate within the online game. Communities live in both space and time. Thus, it is a lifelike system.

Popular game boxes vary from Sony PlayStation, PlayStation 2; Nintendo's GameCube projected to ship Nov 5, '01 in the US; and Microsoft's Xbox projected to ship Nov 8, '01 in the US. "Although game boxes offer higher resolution graphics in comparison to PC gaming, they are a closed hardware platform and less amenable to multiplayer social games. Multiplayer gamers cannot insert their own character skins into shooter games in a game box or with a multiplayer game, such as "EverQuest". "EverQuest" can easily receive updates on the game over time that get rewritten over the original game software," says Schleiner. Many gamers develop friendships with other gamers in different countries using the chat session in "EverQuest".

In some ways, there are as many different types of gamers as there are games. General definitions include:

* Generally, casual gamers are people who enjoy simple decision making games and typically play less technical 3D graphic games. * Generally, traditional gamers are people who enjoy a more complex game. * Multiplayers (simultaneous players) are defined as those who play with other gamers in the same game.

What makes an online game exciting, interesting, social or more fun than another game? Motivation evolves from sensory gratification, role-playing, personality, taste, adrenaline, sociology, immersive and engaging environments, and the element of fun. Games in general motivate ideas. Topics include life, survival, strategy, role-playing, and building relationships. In all circumstances, the player learns by playing. "Building colossal virtual worlds are very important. In a virtual world, everything has a purpose. I love games, " said Minsky during his lecture, "Programs, Emotions and Common Sense".

In Star Trek CCG, gamers can buy and sell, trade and collect digital cards, watch or judge games, and attend tournaments. One disadvantage, prior to downloading the plug-in, a high risk is indicated. The risk is associated with the possibility of gamers accessing your computer if you proceed with download. This warning appears with this statement: "JavaScript or a java applet from DigitalDeck, Inc. is requesting additional privileges." This plug-in is required to run the application.

Because game communities are social in nature, knowledge and understanding are more apparent in virtual worlds. "Wouldn't it be nice to connect two thoughts," said Minsky.

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MMO 2.0

2008-05-28T07:00:00.001-07:00

Lately, there has been a lot to talk about in the MMO-verse, with Age of Conan just getting released and a World of Warcraft expansion pack on track for a holiday unveiling there seems to be nothing that can stop the momentum gained by the industry. However, despite all the success being thrown around by the top five MMOs (World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, EVE Online, Final Fantasy XI) there seems to be very little that is truly pushing the genre towards the "next step."

In every walk of the technological life there are upgrades to the original. Even something as simple as the web was fully upgraded into what has become to lovingly termed: web 2.0. So the same should hold true for MMO, right? You'd think so, but very little has actually changed since the dawning of the 3D MMORPG in the heyday of Everquest. There has been smaller changes like the advent of a quest based storyline and an enhanced mini-map and traveling system, but nothing I'd really call revolutionary, or next generation. Let's face it, nobody out there is really attempting to do anything to set a new standard in the industry.

Now I know that there is at least one EVE Online fan reading this right now in disgust. Let me say this right now, EVE Online is definitely a different experience and CCP has done a marvelous job and creating a successful MMO that strays from the typical archtype that most MMOs follow today. However, that said, they are not setting a standard in the industry. EVE Online and CCP will not be changing the way the industry makes its games and there probably won't be any long lasting affects from their technology. The original Xbox was the first to really incorporate seamless online and now it has become the standard. MySpace truly pushed the bounds of "web 2.0″ with it's social networking applications and it has now become the standard. Apple created the first truly desirable MP3 player and it has now become the standard. All of these are examples of an industry that was expanded on by companies that wished to create a fresh experience on an old application and as such truly changed the landscape of how everybody else played in that field. So despite EVE Online's unique gameplay they certainly haven't changed the way developers make games.

So, where does that leave the industry? With the huge success of World of Warcraft, which handily dashes the success of the other top four MMOs combined, game developers desperately need to find new ways to make their games different and if that means employing a new combat system (Age of Conan) or seriously enhancing the PvP and RvR settings (Warhammer Online) then thats what these companies will do. Unfortunately, many of these "enhancements" are gimmicky at best and won't be offering any true MMO 2.0 anytime soon. However, and this is just my prediction, I think it's safe to say that after all the so called "WoW-killers" have debuted to date, the only MMO that will truly begin to pick away at the house that Blizzard built will be an MMO 2.0 game. Personally, I'm keeping my eye on Copernicus.

P.S. I am in no way calling Age of Conan's combat system or WAR's RvR system bad or flawed, but, rather, non-revolutionary. Yes I have tested out both; Age of Conan beta, Warhammer Online at E for All 2007.

Source : MMOCrunch.com

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What Age of Conan means for WoW

2008-05-27T15:47:00.001-07:00

According to Michael Zenke from Massively, Age of Conan has sold 400,000 copies, out of 700,000 boxes they put on the shelves. Not bad for the first week. And, kudos to Funcom, the release launch went a lot smoother than the beta or early access. The reception of AoC in the blogosphere was a mixed. Keen and Graev already cancelled their accounts again. Tipa from West Karana sees AoC challenging WoW. The Ancient Gaming Noob correctly points out that "MMOs are a long haul proposition" and reserves judgement until having played it more. And the Common Sense Gamer thinks that WoW won't even notice AoC is out.

So here is what I think. I don't have proof, only anecdotal evidence, so preface every phrase here with "In my humble opinion": I think that World of Warcraft suffers from a cycle of peaks and troughs in subscription numbers. This is largely self-inflicted, numbers peak after big content patches and expansions, and fall in long periods of no new content added. Other factors, like summer holidays, also play a role. I do believe that WoW is heading for a major trough of subscription numbers in the western world. Remember that of the 10.7 million WoW players about 6 million are Chinese, who are on a different cycle, and who pay much less. There are less than 5 million players in the US and Europe, and the number will be falling over the summer, because the Burning Crusade is getting long in the tooth, and not everyone likes to spend his summer holidays in front of a computer.

Age of Conan will reach between half a million and one million subscribers this year. Most of which will be ex-WoW players. A good number of them will have stopped playing WoW anyway, with or without AoC, but a couple of hundred thousand will be pushed over the edge and quit WoW for the prospect of a new game. And Blizzard will notice that, because all of these are the well-paying US/Euro kind of subscribers. Age of Conan will not "kill" World of Warcraft, but it will dent it a bit.

Summer will end, christmas will approach, and now everything is possible. WoW could bring out Wrath of the Lich King in November, and it's subscription numbers would peak again. And personally I don't see Age of Conan having much staying power, not in a game where the first people reached the level cap in the first week already. Wrath of the Lich King will make a much larger dent into Age of Conan's subscription numbers than AoC does into WoW's now. But another possibility is that Blizzard misses a 2008 release date for WotLK. And it is also quite possible that Warhammer Online makes that date, and comes out for christmas. And then Blizzard would really start feeling the pain. I do believe that WAR has an even bigger potential of getting subscribers away from WoW than AoC has. If WAR comes out for christmas and WotLK doesn't, they could easily sell a million copies this year. Again, these are all Americans and Europeans, and if WAR beats WotLK to a christmas release, WoW numbers could suffer an even deeper trough.

None of this will "kill" World of Warcraft. But we are talking numbers here that are big enough to show up in a companies annual report of revenue and profits. If Wrath of the Lich King doesn't come out by the end of this year, the 2008 profits from WoW will be significantly lower than those of 2007, and investors and people at Vivendi will notice. Blizzard would bounce back to a dominating position when they bring out Wrath of the Lich King, but then what? If the third expansion is still another 2 years away, the overall trend of WoW subscription numbers could well go into permanent decline. One day WoW won't be the biggest kid on the block any more, not because of one WoW killer, but because of a death by a thousand cuts. The best Blizzard can hope for is that the new champion will be their next generation MMORPG, but that is not a given.

Source : www.Tobold.com

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Anti-Aliased: Age of Con-troversy

2008-05-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

I'm going to hijack my own column this week to cover a topic that I believe is worth spending some space on - Age of Conan and the buzz of negative media attention it has been getting. Age of Conan's controversy spans almost all aspects of the game, from fatalities, to nudity, to even such odd things like race selection.

Now, I've written a few of these articles. I enjoy controversy as the next person and I'm always interested in seeing the opposite viewpoint. It wasn't until I started getting some very, very nice hate mail in my inbox that I began to wonder if anyone understood my own viewpoint on the matter. So, this column is dedicated to other people's opinions, my opinions, controversies and, of course, Age of Conan.

I'm not sure what people expected from a Conan game. It sounds like those who knew their mythos well knew exactly what to expect and embrace it. However, there is, as always, a large amount of the populace who don't know anything about Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howard, or the land of Hyboria. So, one must imagine the surprise when this "Age of Conan" game starts to hit the media and attract attention. Imagine more of their surprise when they realize that you can make a woman and flash her boobies to the rest of the virtual population. If I didn't know about Conan the Barbarian, I'd probably be a little uneasy as well.

Conan's risque features have even had us here at Massively guessing in regards to what we can and cannot put into our writing. Our normal office talk about levels, italicizing game names, and standard debates on what MMOs we should be playing have been punctuated by wonderful lines such as, "Hey, can I say 'nipple toggle'?" (Which I can, apparently.)

Yet... all we have here is an adaptation of Robert E. Howard's fictional world and the people who live in it. The legacy of Conan the Barbarian has been available to the public for over 70 years. The population was even exposed to the violent world of Conan in everyone's favorite movie adaptation starring the Governator. All that's really being done here is the introduction of a visual world. If I may say it, Funcom really hit the mark on this one. Instead of giving us a cheap imitation of what goes on in Hyboria, they cut right to the chase and gave us a good interpretation. For the most part, they stuck to the book and the original fiction. That should be commended, not regarded as lunacy.

I've seen movies bloodier than Age of Conan. I've read books scarier and creepier than Age of Conan. And I've seen enough statues and paintings of nude women to last me a lifetime. Yet, here we are, screaming about exposed bosoms and how it might taint the populace. Has anyone walked through Firenze, Italy recently? Seriously, if anyone wants free "porn", just go to your local museum and check out some of the renaissance art.

And that brings me to my point on nudity - there is nothing to be ashamed about concerning the naked form. Surprise, women have breasts! Who knew, right?

Then the inevitable argument comes up concerning the children. Should our children be allowed to see this violent fantasy world? Should we let the young ones step into the world of Hyboria?

Short answer is no. The long answer is no you crazy parents please do not buy this game for your child for Christmas and then leave your child unattended during their game playing on the intarwebz. First of all, I don't want to babysit your child on Age of Conan and explain to them why that lady is naked in the tavern. Second of all, use the ESRB ratings that are so thoughtfully put down in the corner of the front of every game's box.

For those of you who haven't read the back of Conan's box, let me tell you what the ESRB says is in the game's content. The ESRB rates this game as a mature title, meant for children and adults age 17 and over, as this game contains: blood and gore, intense violence, mature language, nudity, and sexual themes. So, please, do not send me e-mails and do not harass your local GameStop employee regarding the fact you had absolutely no clue that there was nudity and violence in this game. It's seriously on the back of the box.

Controversy starts and stops with the parents. I'm begging you, parents of the world, don't go out and blindly purchase games for your child. We of the game industry have the ESRB ratings system in place for a reason; we want you parents to use it. On the back of every game, in the bottom right hand corner, there is a description of what the game contains so you can see if you really want your child being exposed to this material. If you don't want them to buy this MMO, then there are a sea of other MMOs they can play. Some of them are very welcoming to children and a blast to play. They're also much cheaper than Age of Conan. Cheap as free, in fact.

Make no mistake - Hyboria is a dark world that explores dark themes. The women are beautiful, the ale is great, and the treasures are unmistakably epic. But all of these things come with very steep prices that wouldn't be as steep without the mature content. Hyboria is a world that is built on split blood, slave trade, and ruthlessness. In fact, it sounds very much like the history of a certain world that I'm very well acquainted with. Cimmerians remind me of a certain northern people, Aquilonians remind me of a certain set of ancient people who love debates, and Stygians remind me of a certain group of people who built those triangular thingies in the desert. I guess Hyboria isn't that separated from our world after all.

If you ask me, the only controversy that I can see is letting irresponsible parents have children and inconsiderate nutjobs (NSFW) opening their mouths to the media. Maybe we should have a law that will give jail time to parents who give consent to clerks to sell their 10-year-olds Age of Conan and Grand Theft Auto IV, instead of jailing the clerks.

Because I was on vacation last week and was unable to post my column, you all get a bonus! Look for a second edition of Anti-Aliased hitting Massively.com on Thursday. It's like early Christmas, except it's not Christmas and you're not getting any extra presents except my ramblings. But, honestly, is there any better present? I think not.

Source : massively.com

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Advantages of a 2d Mmorpg Over a 3d Mmorpg

2008-05-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

With the market being saturated with games requiring cutting edge technology platforms and connections such as World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Tabula Rasa, Warhammer, and Age of Conan, is there really a point to playing a 2d game? Even though the obvious answer may appear to be no, the real answer is an emphatic yes!

One of the main reasons people choose 2d mmorpgs over their 3d counterparts is because of system requirements and capabilities. To currently run World Of Warcraft one needs a pretty updated computer, not to mention graphics card; in comparison most 2d mmo news's don't have strict minimum requirements and can be played by the masses, including countries that are just getting into the technology era. This is important as it allows users from all over to join in and get a true sense of community vs a game where it can only be played by the 'well-off' or richer areas of the world.

Besides a less strict requirement to play and bigger available player base, 2d games can give the user a "General's" mentality when playing the game. In 3d games one is often in first person view or very close to it and they can only see from that perspective. In a 2d mmorpg news a user can see the whole screen/field and make decisions based on that. It tends to lead to a less stressful, more fullfilling experience as you see all around you.

Going back to technology, 2d games technology and artwork are pretty much mastered at this point, whereas 3d games are still evolving to become more real and less polygon like mmorpg blog. A 2d game made today can have the best 2d graphics which could either look realistic or go for a clean/crisp/bright cartoon look; The ability to make the game as intentioned is a huge plus for 2d video games and games like diablo II, starcraft II, and revamped Ultima Online prove how great 2d graphics can now look.

Another huge advantage is movement and pvp. Currently 3d pvp is awkward and less related to movement on screen as compared with button mashing, unless you're playing a FPS. 2d games are easier to maneuver for now and give the user greater control over his character/avatar. This allows for more precision attacks and movement within the virtual world; old school ultima online mmorpg news is a classic example of how an easy interface, simple graphics, and movement made it one of the greatest pvp games of all time. In contrast, DAoC was laggy, buggy, and movement was very non user friendly. Five years later in World of Warcraft it has improved dramatically but the time/spatial relations in 3d have not been mastered so pvp in that environment will never be as consistent as that of a 2d game today.

To recap:
You don't need to buy the newest hardware to play and usually can play on a dial up as well.
The member base/community is larger due to less stringent hardware/network requirements and gives a more broad sense of community. No more just playing against rich people.
The art is mastered; the 2d graphics have been pushed to their limits and allow stunning visuals for both a realistic and cartoonish look.
Playability, movement, pvp; 2d games just allow the user to run his character like a general and pinpoint his moves. 3d is still evolving and figuring out what it can and can not do.
Nostalgia...don't these great games bring back memories?

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Advantages of a 2d Mmorpg Over a 3d Mmorpg

2008-05-26T16:44:00.001-07:00

Age of Conan one of the fastest selling PC games of all time

2008-05-26T09:28:00.001-07:00

Over 400,000 gamers have entered game - First 20 reviews with an average review score above 90%

Durham, USA - May 26th, 2008 - Funcom is proud to announce that Age of Conan is one of the fastest selling PC games of all time. More than 400.000 gamers have entered Hyboria over the last few days, with almost half coming from the North American market. This amazing figure for a PC game shows that the positive pre-order trend has transferred into actual sales, and people from all over the world are now flocking to the most savage, sexy and brutal MMO ever created.

Over the weekend an astounding amount of concurrent gamers were logged on to the game, making Age of Conan one of the busiest MMOs in the western hemisphere. With stock flying out of several retail chains, Funcom expects the number to increase in the days to come. In addition to the many gamers logging in, there was also substantial traffic to the Age of Conan websites, with more than 2,2 million unique visitors during the last ten days.

As a result of the great launch, players and press have been raving about the unique qualities of the game, and the first 20 reviews give Age of Conan an average score above 90%. The first US reviews are also live, with Gamezone.com giving the game an Editor's Choice Award, a 9.4 of 10 score, while heralding Age of Conan as a "Benchmark MMO". Sci-Fi.com was also an early mover and gave the game a straight A, stating that "If Robert E. Howard had been a game designer.., this is the Conan he would have invented."

"The initial sales and reviews are very encouraging, and it's great to see that so many are enjoying Age of Conan," said Funcom CEO Trond Arne Aas. "This is just the beginning, and we already look forward to massive updates and cool new features. We believe our focus on making Conan unique and groundbreaking is a key reason for the initial success. This is a focus we will keep and reinforce, and players can expect continued quality and innovation as we enter a new era for the game."

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MMORPGs dimensions

2008-05-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

In this post I would like to talk about massively multiplayer online roleplaying games in terms of their length, depth, and breadth. I want to define these terms of the dimensions of a MMORPGs, and explain their importance when reviewing a game. And, to spice things up, I'll then go off on a tangent and rant about the Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion of World of Warcraft just announced last weekend.

The length of a MMORPG is probably the dimension that is most often discussed. How long does it take you from starting the game to reaching a more or less well-defined end-point, like the level cap, or the point where you are completely geared up with epics. If a game is too short, you'll "finish" it too fast and move on. If a game is too long, you get stuck for weeks in the same level, until you finally give up. The ideal length is defined by the attention span of you average player. In my opinion the original World of Warcraft got very close to the ideal length, at least for my needs. I had never reached the level cap of really long games like Everquest, and after having played MMORPGs for years, WoW was the first in which I reached the level cap. But other approaches are possible. Guild Wars for example is deliberately short, having only 20 levels, so people can concentrate on the PvP end game.

The depth of a MMORPG is harder to grasp, it is more of a gut feeling than a measurable thing. Most players just call it the "fun". I would define depth as the tactical depth of encounters, how many different viable options I have to do things. Or to cite my favorite game quote again: "A good game is a series of interesting decisions. The decisions must be both frequent and meaningful." — Sid Meier. Depth describes how interesting and meaningful the decisions are. In reviewing depth is often the first dimension we see, because the length and breadth of a game take much much time to explore. But whether for example a combat in a MMORPG is "fun" and interesting, or a boring, repetitive mashing of always the same button is quickly found out.

The breadth of a MMORPG is about it's replayability. At any given level, how much choice of content do you have? If you reached the level cap with your first character and want to play a second one, would he go through the same content again, or would you experience a completely different series of quests, zones, and mobs? This is a dimension in which the original World of Warcraft was really, really strong as well as games like runescape. WoW initially had *six* completely different newbie zones, while many other games have just one or two. And sometimes developers "cheat", offering several newbie zones, but doing a lot of copying and pasting of quests and mobs, thus only creating an illusion of choice.

The complete shape of a MMORPG is a curious one, because the depth and breadth often change over the length. A MMORPG is not a rectangular box (cuboid). For example very often at low levels the depth of the game is less, you start out with only one or two spells or abilities, and then learn more over the length of the game. The breadth can also vary a lot. Very frequently a game gets released with sufficient low level content, and has less and less breadth towards the higher levels. Lord of the Rings Online is a typical example of that. The original World of Warcraft had a lot of low level content and less mid- and high-level content too. But curiously the patches and the first expansion added both low- and high-level content, while not adding much in the middle, giving the game a really strange shape now. There are tons of quests and content level 1 to 20 with the now eight newbie zones, then it gets thinner in the 20 to 50 region, but then there are again tons of things to do between level 50 and 70.

Now if you are a game developer and plan an expansion, you have to see to which dimension you want to add of that shape. Depth is the most difficult, but for example the introduction of slotted weapons and armor in the Burning Crusade added to the depth of the game, if only at the higher levels. Adding either length or breadth is a design choice. And this is where the rant part comes in. Burning Crusade already added to the length of WoW, while adding breadth only in the level 1 to 20 part. So why on earth is Wrath of the Lich King just adding length?

Now of course there is part of the player population that are at the level cap, and who don't plan to ever play anything else but their current main character. And those players of course will like the added length. But the numbers of World of Warcraft having "9 million subscribers" hide the fact that this isn't the same 9 million people all the time. World of Warcraft is still selling very well in the shops, so the pretty much constant number of players we've seen over the last year means that there are as many people joining the game as there are leaving. Besides all those new players, there are many existing players starting alts all the time. So for everybody starting or restarting at level 1 we have to ask ourselves whether World of Warcraft isn't approaching the point where it gets *too* long. People who wanted to make an Alliance shaman or Horde paladin for raiding were already complaining how long that took to get to the level cap again. And on the "black market" of World of Warcraft you see more and more offers for powerleveling. If someone pays somebody else hundreds of dollars to skip part of the length of a game, something is wrong with the design. If after leveling your main to 80 in Wrath of the Lich King you get bored with the level 80 end game, or your guild really, really needs a priest, the decision to level up an alt is getting less and less attractive.

And it is not only the increasing length that puts people off from making alts, it is also the lack of breadth in certain levels. How many people made a Draenei or Blood Elf, but then stopped playing it after level 20 when the new Burning Crusade content ran out? Nobody wants to do Stranglethorn Vale quests again. There are areas where World of Warcraft has deficits, and the Wrath of the Lich King expansion fails to address those. A new continent with level 1 to 60, or even 20 to 60 content would have fixed problems in areas where WoW is lacking breadth.

Wrath of the Lich King shows that World of Warcraft is on a trajectory which simply isn't sustainable. You can't just make the game 10 levels longer with every expansion and ignore the other dimensions. Sooner or later you get two separate populations, one of veterans at the highest levels, and one of new players and alts at the lower levels, unable to catch up. Do we really want to have the level cap raised to 150 in the year 2015?

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Egy Seonyár2008 a Flörtben

2008-05-25T10:44:00.001-07:00

Ennek a rövidke cikknek a lényege a seonyár2008 versenyen résztvevő oldalam poziciójának javítása. Tekintve hogy még ezt a seonyár2008 cikket is lusta vagyok megírni, így kénytelen leszek ide bemásolni valami szövegecskét megtűzdelni a kulcsszavakkal (pl seonyár2008) így aztán frankón releváns lesz a szöveg :D

Szupernóva-robbanás az első felvonás elejétől

A NASA Swift mesterséges holdjának és a véletlen szerencsének köszönhetően a csillagászat történetében először sikerült közvetlenül az elejétől nyomon követni egy szupernóva-robbanást.

A szupernóva-robbanások (ilyen pl. ahogy az oldalam berobban a seonyár20008 versenybe) a legnagyobb energiát felszabadító események közé tartoznak a Világegyetemben, ezért még óriási távolságból is jól megfigyelhetők. A robbanást magát azonban eddig még senki nem látta, ugyanis a felfedezéskor az objektum már túl van ezen az egyébként nagyon rövid ideig tartó fázison, s a megfigyelők csak a környező térrész és a robbanás által ledobott anyag kölcsönhatásának eredményét észlelhették. Ez a folyamat egy néhány hétig tartó kifényesedésből, ún. felszálló ágból, majd a maximális fényesség elérése után egy több hónapig tartó elhalványodásból, a leszállóágból áll. A robbanás (min az én seo-robbanásom :) a seonyár20008 versenyben) maga tehát mindezideig rejtve maradt a kutatók előtt, pedig észlelése rendkívül fontos lenne a fizikai részletek alaposabb megismeréséhez. Ehhez azonban tudni kellene, hogy a robbanás hol, az égbolt mely területén, mely galaxisában fog bekövetkezni. Ennek a valószínűsége azonban nyilván nullához nagyon közeli, bár nem lehetetlen.

IMAGE

A felső, röntgen- és ultraibolya tartományban készült képeken csak az SN 2007uy szupernóva látható az NGC 2770 galaxisban. A két nappal később készült felvételeket már az SN 2008D dominálja, melynek az előző képpáron még semmilyen nyoma nem észlelhető. [Soderberg és tsai]

2008. január 9-én a gyakorlatilag nulla valószínűségű esemény azonban mégis bekövetkezett, egy szerencsés véletlen a csillagászok segítségére sietett. Alicia Soderberg és Edo Berger (Princeton University) a NASA Swift mesterséges holdjának röntgenteleszkópjával éppen az NGC 2770 katalógusjelű, 90 millió fényévnyire levő galaxisban 2007 végén feltűnt, de már az elhalványulási szakaszban lévő SN 2007uy jelű szupernóvát vizsgálták, mikor a galaxis másik részében egy nagyon erős röntgenfelvillanást vettek észre. A forrás körülbelül 1 percig fényesedett, amit 7-8 percig tartó halványodás követett az észlelhetőségi határig. Soderbergék azonnal riasztották a földi és űrtávcsövek irányítóközpontjait, értesítve őket a különleges eseményről. A következő napok megfigyelései aztán megerősítették, hogy nem egy ismeretlen típusú objektumról van szó, hanem egy Ibc típusú szupernóva robbanását sikerült már rögtön a legelején elkapni. Az objektum az SN 2008D jelzést kapta, lévén a negyedikként felfedezett szupernóva 2008-ban.

IMAGE

Az SN 2008D helyén észlelt forrás röntgentartománybeli "fénygörbéje". Jól látható rajta a beütésszám gyors felfutása, az észlelés megkezdése után körülbelül 1 perccel bekövetkezett maximum, majd a csökkenés a berendezés érzékenységi határa alá. A leszálló szakaszban a beütésszám 129 másodperc alatt esett a maximális 1/e-szeresére. [Soderberg és tsai]

A modellek szerint az Ibc típusú szupernóvák szülőcsillagai az ún. Wolf-Rayet csillagok. Ezen magas hőmérsékletű objektumok mérete a Napéhoz hasonló, tömegük azonban jóval nagyobb annál, az adott esetben a becslések szerint körülbelül 30 naptömeg. Jellemzőjük, hogy életük során erős csillagszél formájában jelentős mennyiségű anyag távozik róluk, így szinte teljesen elveszítik a hidrogént még tartalmazó külső rétegeiket. A maradék rész nagyon gazdag héliumban, míg a csillag összeroppanás előtt álló sűrű magja szinte teljes egészében vasból áll - nem úgy mint az én seonyár20008 oldalam. A szupernóva-robbanás akkor következik be, amikor az erősen lecsökkent energiaprodukciójú mag már nem tud ellenállni a külső rétegek ránehezedő nyomásának, s pillanatszerűen összeomlik, kiindulási tömegtől függően egy neutroncsillagot vagy egy fekete lyukat létrehozva. Az összeroskadás által generált lökéshullám elegendő energiával rendelekezik ahhoz, hogy a csillag külső részeit ledobja, s a levetett anyagot a fénysebesség néhány százalékára gyorsítsa. Amikor ez a ledobott burok utoléri a csillagról korábban csillagszél formájában távozott anyagot, bekövetkezik az a felfénylés, ami alapján eddig felfedezték a szupernóvákat.

IMAGE A WR124 jelű Wolf-Rayet csillag körüli köd a Hubble űrteleszkóp felvételén. [Y. Grosdidier (University of Montreal, Observatoire de Strasbourg) és tsai]

A robbanás lefolyásával foglalkozó elméletek azt jósolják, hogy amikor a lökéshullám eléri a csillag felszínét, még mielőtt szétvetné, annyira felmelegíti az anyagot, hogy ennek eredményeként egy erős röntgen- és ultraibolya felvillanásnak kell bekövetkeznie. Ez lenne az első esemény tehát, ami a robbanás bekövetkeztét jelzi (eltekintve most a neutrinók áramától és a kollapszus okozta esetleges gravitációs hullámoktól), s az SN 2008D esetében a Swift éppen ezt a felvillanást kapta el! A közvetlenül ezután készült színképeken nem látszik közel fénysebességgel mozgó jet-ek nyoma, így kizárható, hogy az esemény esetleg egy gammavillanás (GRB, Gamma-Ray Burst) lett volna.

Egy másik, M. Modjaz (University of California, Berkeley) vezette kutatócsoport a robbanás után több hónappal készült spektrumok alapján, a neutrális oxigén tiltott vonalainak szerkezetéből ugyanakkor úgy találta, hogy a robbanás maga aszimmetrikus volt. A mag összeomlására vonatkozó egyik elképzelés szerint a felszabaduló energia jelentős része a mag forgástengelyének irányában közel fénysebességgel mozgó keskeny jet-ek formájában távozik. Ha ezek energiája kellően nagy, a pólusok körül szinte kilyukaszthatják a csillagot, s a tengely irányában egy gammavillanást, vagy egy röntgenflert eredményezhetnek. Ha energiájuk ehhez nem elegendő, vagy nyílásszögük nem eléggé kicsi, akkor nem jutnak ki a csillagból, hanem szétvetik azt, mégpedig aszimmetrikusan.

Sodeberg szerint a mostani, véletlennek köszönhető felfedezés csak az első lépés, a közeljövő röntgentartománybeli égboltfelmérései tömegével fedezhetik fel a szupernóvákat már a robbanás pillanatában, lásd seonyár20008.

Az eredményeket részletező szakcikk a Nature magazin 2008. május 22-i számában jelent meg.

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AoC - Next Generation of Button Masher?

2008-05-25T05:56:00.001-07:00

You'll have to excuse me whilst I think (…urmmm, type…) out loud here for a second…cause I'm not sure I'm convinced about what I'm about to write.

Firstly, you'll recall in my earlier writings that I think the whole premise of "next generation", well…anything …is usually a load of marketing BS. Usually, you're left scratching your head when you hear those words and then look at the feature list of the product that people are trying to sell. That's just it really, much like "polish", the words "next generation" is up there with "family values" and "concerned" parent groups when it comes to empty meanings.

Up to now, in terms of video game products, there is only one product that is truly generational…the Wii. Why? I've said it before…the interface to the player. The Wiimote makes it next generation. The 360 and the PS3 (*cough* abysmal failure *cough*) are not next generation. The only thing that makes them attractive to people is the shiny new graphics. They both still use the same old tried and true console control system. They still use the same old tried and true console gameplay. Nothing substantial…and I mean nothing…separates them from their previous incarnations.

In comes Age of Conan. I was not impressed by it's feature list…and to some extent, I'm still not. I'll have more on that later once I get my head around all of the thoughts swirling around. Now, one thing that AoC is doing differently is this "active" combat style. No….you can't just press "1, 2, 3″ and still win a fight. As you progress, these combat combinations get a little more complex (…I have no idea what they look like at level 80…) and you need to pay attention to your screen in order to fight…and there it is. The secret to "next generation", in my mind at least, is bringing the player into the game more. Getting the player to interact with the game at a different level. You can't just up the graphics and then call it a day…and personally, I think that's cheating the players and the industry as a whole. However, you want graphics, AoC has those in spades as well. Dear gawd does it ever have a nice look and feel to it. It feels like Conan. It looks like Conan…AND, it brings me in with a true next generation feature of a more interactive combat style.

OK…big frickin deal. So instead of pressing "1,2,3″, I'm now pressing "combo-power, 1,1,2″. Yeah, you are…hence why I'm talking out loud here and wondering how everyone else feels about this. Let's assume that I'm correct about what "next generation" actually means (i.e. player interaction with the game)…am I full of it when it comes to calling AoC next generation just for this feature? Is it actually a game that is doing something different with player interaction, or is it a combination of elements within the game that is combining to give me this impression?

D out.

P.S. Yes…you can pretty much expect AoC posts for the majority of the week ;)

Source : commonsensegamer.com

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Is WoW an unstoppable train?

2008-05-25T05:46:00.001-07:00

Right now? Perhaps, though I haven't really been a part of the community for over a year so I couldn't tell you first hand. Some people apparently do think so… In the future though? I just don't believe it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to pick on World of Warcraft specifically with this post, but it's a proven fact that time has been the dark red line creeping slowly towards the heart of every MMORPG to date. Time allows for competitive growth. Time leads to player complacency and boredom. Time is what makes the present become the past.

I've been checking out MMOG Chart lately and came across this interesting 2008 ION presentation from self-taught MMORPG analyst, Sir Bruce. The presentation is an analysis of MMORPG subscription growth based on some reasonably current data.

Here are some broad conclusions drawn by SirBruce on the state of World of Warcraft (based on historical trends in the genre).

* The MMOG subscription market continues to grow; 16M+ now, 20M+ in 2009 (pred. 2006), 30M+ in 2012
* World of Warcraft to peak at 11M – 12M by 2010
* Most retail-launched MMOGs have an initial growth phase during the first year, followed by 1 – 3 years of a more stable, "mature" subscription base, and then a noticeably and often sharp decline.
* New markets grow subscriptions, but expansions packs mostly cover churn and provide a retail presence.

Based on his charts in the presentation, most of the MMORPGs released prior to WoW saw a fairly large decline in subscriptions. We can assume the majority of these losses became gains for WoW. This just makes sense. It can't be denied, however, that the total number of people playing WoW last year is much larger than the sum of all previous MMORPG subscripions. This shows that WoW introduced many new players to the genre.

Sounds like common sense right? Duh? It's still nice to have the numbers tell the story.

What's to stop the same thing from happening again? It may not have happened with Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea, or Lord of the Rings Online. These games haven't had any noticeable impact on WoW's subscriptions, but that doesn't mean it won't happen eventually.

Age of Conan had over one million beta signups and released over 700,000 copies of their game, which is the largest MMORPG launch to date. They haven't announced current subscription numbers yet, but heck, it's been less than a week. Given them some time. The time is ripe for a new AAA MMORPG and I think AoC will benefit greatly from this. It's only competing against older, established MMORPGs right now, which in my opinion, is better than competing against something new. As I said, time makes people susceptible to boredom. Boredom leads to trying out new things. And trying out new things leads to the dark side of the… Ugh.

Warhammer Online will also be launching this fall and by all rights should be an enormous success. Another delay is bad news for a whole bunch of obvious reasons. Competing directly against WotLK is also bad news if they hope to capitalize on the bored WoW player-base. As SirBruce says, expansions cover churn, in other words, customer attrition. They're a stop-gap measure to keep players from leaving for greener pastures. Competing directly against an expansion trying to keep 11M people playing WoW is just a whole new level of stupid, making bad business sense. You can get high and mighty, saying your game will be done when its done, but wait too long and the strategy will bite you in the ass. Theres a point where you have to compromise.

WoW is the current king but it won't remain that way forever. Heck, Blizzard is already working on another MMORPG and it could be that title that eventually dethrones it. I will eat these words if AoC and WAR aren't immensely successful, because if either of these two titles can't do it, it may take a lot longer than I expected. Still, it is inevitable - and resistance is futile (but strongly recommended if Vivendi wants to keep its shareholders happy).

Source : thegreenskin.com

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AoC downtime

2008-05-22T23:37:00.001-07:00

I solved my Age of Conan crash problems by following the advice of a friend and guild mate, who insisted that I buy a sound card, because that would make my computer faster than just using onboard sound. I'm not an expert, but it appears as if my Nvidia motherboard doesn't really have a sound chip, it only emulates one using CPU power. So adding a sound card would free the CPU to do other stuff. I found a Soundblaster Audigy SE for 40 Euro, installed it, and tested that my AoC crash problem when casting a certain spell with sound on was gone.

But that was all I did in AoC last night, because then the European servers had a server maintenance downtime for 8 pm to 1 am scheduled, in preparation for the Euro launch on the 23rd. I really don't understand why all this downtime always has to be scheduled during prime time. And I've read the US early access period was even worse, because it was only 3 days, and of that time the servers were up only 48 hours, with one downtime scheduled the evening of the last day. I so hope that once the game is launched everywhere, the maintenance window is moved to mornings, local time. I find scheduled server maintenance starting at in the evening or late afternoon unacceptable for a MMO.

Source : Tobold

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Warhammer Online takes you to school with Scenarios 101

2008-05-22T02:53:00.001-07:00

The official Warhammer Online site is a cornucopia of goodness. If you're not watching the production podcasts, Paul's video blogs are fantastic. If you're more in a text mood, there are zone previews and developer diaries to page through.

Their most recent addition to the site is over in the "special features" category, a continuation of their ongoing class in WAR: Scenarios 101. These pieces run down the rules and layout for the many and varied Realm Vs. Realm scenarios Warhammer Online will ship with. EA Mythic's answer to the WoW Battleground phenomenon, they're going to offer some of the game's meat and potatoes PvP combat over the course of a player's gameplay lifespan.

The newest 101 feature is all about the scenarios named Grovod Caverns and Reikland Hills. The caverns is a 'capture the flag'-style game, but with a twist. Flags and bases are up on a series of platforms, all connected with walkways. Every time a flag is captured, a walkway gives way; this changes the dynamic of the scenario's very surface, and forces players to adapt and change their strategies as the match progresses. Reikland, meanwhile, is a 'king of the hill'-style game that requires players to capture and hold a position for a few minutes at a time. The catch is that one of three 'hills' will be available at any given time, and the newest hill will overlap with the oldest one for some time. It's great to see how Mythic is planning to shake up some PvP assumptions with these maps. Source : massively.com

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Officers' Quarters: Jerk message of the day

2008-05-19T11:15:00.001-07:00

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.
I've spent the past six weeks talking about raiding, so I think it's time to get away from the topic and talk about something less drama-ridden, like the guild message of the day feature. What could be more straightforward and less controversial, right? Well, as this week's e-mail reminds us, no part of leading a guild is completely free of incident.
Would rather not name the guild but it's on Bronzebeard EU. Only the Guildmasters (of which there are 10) can set the message of the day. Despite this security, an offensive homophobic message of the day appeared one day. I'm afraid I didn't see it as I wasn't online while it was up, but when another Guildmaster saw it, it was immediately removed. No one owned up to it and no one could think who would do it, so one Guildmaster (a friend of mine in real life) logged a complaint with Blizzard to try and find out who set this message.
He spent a couple of weeks chasing an answer but in the end they said that who set the message was private account information that they would not give out to someone else (great cop out isn't it :) ). And there we are stuck! A couple of guildmasters left for more hardcore raiding guilds, so maybe, hopefully it was one of them . . . but I guess we'll never know. Can you think of anything that could be done to avoid this or controls to avoid this kind of offensive message?
The only way to avoid this situation is to make sure the people who have access to the GMoTD are trustworthy and responsible people. If your own officers prove that they aren't, then the guild leader can actually modify the permissions so that only he or she can change the message. But there is no built-in censorship to this feature aside from the one that sits in everyone's interface panel, and even then I don't know if the profanity filter actually affects the GMoTD.
Since you (perhaps wisely) didn't specify what the message actually read, it's difficult to judge the severity of the situation. A lot of guys who are otherwise mature adults sometimes joke around in a way that could be construed as homophobic, but typically no offense is meant. It can be good-natured smack talk, but it can also go too far and get truly offensive. Since another officer went to the trouble of contacting Blizzard about the message, I'll have to assume it's the latter.
Even though this person wasn't "caught," I'd say the officers should meet with one another and ask the offending party to step forward. Based on your e-mail, they may have already done so. However, it's entirely possible that none of the officers know who did it. If an officer's friend or roommate snuck onto the officer's machine while he or she was AFK, then that person could have changed the message with no one the wiser.
More important than who did it is how the officers respond to the situation. An apology should be made to the guild's membership. It should also be communicated that effort was taken to look into the matter, even if the results were inconclusive. If members were upset by the message, they need to know that the officers weren't passive or dismissive of the insult.
In the end, it's not necessarily a huge deal and shouldn't be made into one by extended periods of finger-pointing. Sometimes overreacting to a situation can be just as bad as not reacting at all.

Source : WoWInsider.com

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Runescape Community

2008-05-16T08:17:00.001-07:00

Most RuneScape players speak English. Players who speak languages other than English tend to gravitate to servers populated by other players who speak the same language. Some worlds have larger numbers of players who speak Spanish, Dutch, French, German, or other languages. It is not uncommon, however, to see many languages on the chat screen throughout RuneScape. A German translation of RuneScape has also been released, while a French version of the game is in production.

A set of official forums is provided by Jagex on the RuneScape website. On the forums, members are able to participate in game discussions, play player-made forum games, arrange to buy or sell items, post suggestions for further game improvements, vote in polls and otherwise interact with the community. Free players can read the forums, but posting is reserved for paying members.
Unlike many MMORPG official forums, the Games like RuneScape forums have very limited features. User profiles do not exist and a user cannot set an avatar, signature, or separate display name. Users cannot use text formatting, post url address links, nor display images. A topic is automatically and permanently deleted after it surpasses the fiftieth page, so during busier times of the day, a topic can be deleted as quickly as a few minutes unless it is constantly "bumped".

Players can submit email questions to any non-player character in the game. Selected letters are answered in a monthly update called Postbag from the Hedge. This feature began on 26 September 2005 and has since become one of the most accessed pages of the site. Beginning 24 September 2002, players could submit questions to the RuneScape gods; however, this feature was discontinued on 9 December 2004.
Players can also submit original RuneScape related artwork, some of which is displayed in a gallery on the RuneScape website. Media featured have included sculpture, comics, drawings, and paintings.

Many Games like RuneScape fansites have been established by players, none of which are supported or recognized by Jagex. Although in the early days of RuneScape the official website had a links page which listed several fansites, this is no longer the case. In order to provide players with an alternative, official site to get the information they want or need, Jagex introduced the Knowledge Base, which offers information on gameplay, the main RuneScape rules, and account security.
Jagex discourages the discussion of fansites within the game or the official forums - and a rule specifically prohibits sharing web addresses. At least one major fansite has criticised Jagex for not recognising fansites' contributions to the development of its game.

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2008-05-15T14:51:00.001-07:00

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Why Mythic thinks Warhammer should be your first MMO

2008-05-15T04:57:00.001-07:00

It's always interesting to hear the reasons people don't play MMOs. The time commitment is a common and very valid concern - as is the boredom of the grind, the sameness of the games, and the meaninglessness of the avatar's story. Patrick Klepeck of MTV Games offers up a new reason, noting that the freedom of exploration often lauded by MMO fans is (to him) a significant drawback. Warhammer Online's content director Destin Bales responded to Klepeck's apathy with two words: public quests. At the MTV Multiplayer site they have a great description of the PQ Bales used to show him what the genre has to offer. A hydra attack on a Dark Elf sea vessel tops off the event, a setpiece battle we also touched on in our WAR update from a few weeks back.

Another recent rundown on EA Mythic's in-development title is available from Gamespy; they offer players unfamiliar with MMOs their own intro to the genre, with a description of the newbie Dark Elf and Dwarven areas. Despite some reservations that the game's new player area doesn't highlight many of Warhammer's standout features, writer Miguel Lopez was impressed with the 'sense of place' the starter zones impart. Says Lopez: "[WAR] quest areas don't seem to be places that wandering monsters simply arbitrarily inhabit; at least in the two areas we checked out, there was a definite rhyme and reason for mob X to be patrolling site Y. The effort to build the environments like this go a long way toward negating one of the most common criticisms levied against MMOs: that they feel like static wax museums inhabited by staid 3D models."

Source : massively.com

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Star Wars Galaxies: Jason Ryan Movin' On

2008-05-08T20:56:00.001-07:00

Titling his swan song at SWG "Time to Say Farewell", Jason Ryan announced today that he's moving to Free Worlds and taking on the Community Manager position there.

Greetings, all!

The time has come to let everyone know that I'll be leaving the SWG team and heading across genres to become the Community Manager for our upcoming title Free Realms. There is definitely a bitter-sweet sensation to moving to a new title. I'll miss the people I have met and interacted with. I'll also miss the events themselves and the fun discussions leading up to them. I'll miss talking about schemes and plots and super-weapons and attacks and kidnappings and weddings and...you get the idea.

I know, I know. "How can you leave Star Wars for something...not Star Wars?" The decision to leave wasn't easy. I've been with SWG for almost five years now. I've lived and breathed Vader and the Rebellion and all the storylines ever run by. I've had a blast and I have never ceased to be amazed by the creativity and dedication I have encountered.

The opportunity to work on Free Realms is just too tempting so I applied for the position and got it. I'm ready for new adventures, even if they don't involve Ewoks, Stormtrooopers or holograms of the Emperor. I've always taken my job and the events I help support very personally and I am very proud of the work I have done. I hope that level of commitment has come across to those with whom I have interacted during my tenure on SWG.

The big question has certainly got to be "What about Event Support?" Currently there is no plan to continue player-run event support. The Dev Team will continue to upgrade and add to Storyteller, which already allows you to execute many of the abilities that I have provided in the past. Actually, it has a lot more functionality than I had for the first year or two of running event support. Granted, there will no longer be someone to show up to a player event as Leia or Darth Vader, or to officiate a wedding or decorate the inside of the Theed palace...so that will take some getting used to. The Dev team has been wonderful and very supportive of Storyteller and in-game holidays, so I look forward to more support for those aspects of the game in the years to come.

I am buoyed by the fact that Storyteller is getting bigger and better at putting event 'control' in your hands, so player events will get bigger and better too, even if I am on another title. The options that are open to you really are extraordinary and quite unprecedented in any MMO of this type. I know this will take some getting used to and will lead to more and more creativity when using the Storyteller system.

I'll be making the transition over the next month and will be full time on Free Realms by the end of May or early June. I don't have all the details yet, but I will let you know as soon as I have them.

Thank you all for your continued enthusiasm and support. I will always look back on my time with SWG as a wonderful time spent interacting with great people.

Source : WarCry Network

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Solofication of Massive Multiplayer RPGs

2008-05-07T17:23:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time there was a MMORPG called Everquest, and it forced players to group to progress. For most classes you could only solo the newbie zones, and starting from about level 10 or so you would discover that the lowest level mob that still gave experience points to you was already too hard for you to kill alone.
But a few classes could use special tactics to solo anyway, druid were kiting mobs after them, and necromancers were fear kiting mobs away from them. (I played a quad kiting druid.) And it turned out that soloing was popular: far more people played druids or necromancers than playing any other class.

So every new generation of free MMORPGs made soloing easier and easier, because that was what the customer wanted, until we arrived at World of Warcraft, where every single class is basically expected to solo all the way up to the level cap. There are differences in the speed at which the different classes and talent trees can solo, but even least soloable class can kill mobs and do quests of his own level. And soloing is still popular, with classes that solo faster being played more than classes that solo slower.

And as soloing was what the customer wanted, some unknown developer at Blizzard came up with a brilliant idea: What if PvP could be made soloable too? That sounded crazy, because by definition you need at least 2 players for PvP, and if you wanted more than just duels you needed large groups on both sides of a battle. But that unknown dev realized that it wasn't necessary to have players actually form pre-arranged groups to do PvP. It wasn't absolutely necessary for players to cooperate in PvP. Sure, a group that cooperated would beat a group that didn't, but you could very well create a balanced battle between two groups as long as both of them were equally unorganized. And thus battlegrounds were born, and once Blizzard tweaked the PvP reward system they were extremely popular. And the majority of people basically solo battlegrounds, that is queue up for them alone, and then do whatever they want once inside. I call that pseudo-solo. This goes so far that people actually complain if they end up against an organized group. I don't know if that unknown developer switched from Blizzard to EA Mythic, or whether EA Mythic had their own developer realizing that this solofication strategy could be applied to PvE raid content as well. Because what they did was they invented the "public quest". Which works basically like a battleground, just for PvE instead of PvP. People just join, without arranging groups, everyone does what he thinks is best, while a few frustrated players try to shout orders and are generally ignored. Pseudo-solo large group PvE content, where everyone gets rewarded, I'm sure people will love it. Soloing is what the customers want. But a free MMORPG has a large and diverse base of customers, and not all of them prefer solo play. As early as Everquest some people noticed that a group is stronger than the sums of its parts. The larger the group, and the better it is coordinated, the greater the challenges it can overcome. Moving from open world to instanced content, developers were able to limit how many players could attack a specific challenge. But they couldn't prevent players from organizing themselves better and better, training each encounter for hours and hours, until even a large raid group moved with a coordination that would make the bolshoi ballet green from envy. And thus an arms race evolved, on the other side of the MMORPG from the solo content, a race in which developers would design harder and harder challenges, and raiders would again and again prove that these challenges could be beaten with perfect coordination. To understand that arms race, Blizzard hired one of Everquest's top raiders as lead designer, and consequently spent a lot of development effort on designing ultra-hard raid content.
There were clearly *some* customers that wanted this, and not solo content. And while the number of top raiders wasn't large, they were deemed to be influence leaders, the kind of people that other players looked up to, and also the kind of players who were most likely to post a lot of comments on game forums or other places of the internet. And it worked! While the number of players actually experiencing the highest level of raid content is still tiny, the desire to be a raider is certainly far more wide-spread.

The problem is that these two parts of the game are drifting further and further apart in World of Warcraft and the MMORPG genre in general. Soloing becomes easier and easier, the need to group during leveling up has been nearly completely removed, elite mobs turned into soloable non-elites, and the rewards for pseudo-solo PvP have been much increased. It is now possible to go from level 1 to level 70 and full epic gear in World of Warcraft without ever joining a group once. And the classes who are best at soloing fast or best at PvP are the most popular and most played. Meanwhile raiding remains hard, because that is the very reason of being for it, and even harder raid content as added to the end with every content patch. But to overcome these challenges, people need to learn how to play rpg games in a coordinated way. And the mix of classes, talents, and gear required for raiding is very different from what is most popular and easy to achieve in the soloing part of the game. Slowly but surely the two modes of gameplay drift so far apart that cracks begin to appear, threatening the whole model. From a raider's point of view the leveling game now fails to fulfil it's function of getting people ready to raid. Sure, they might be level 70 and have epic gear, but they might still be totally useless for a raid: they have not even the most basic training of how to play their class in a group, and they are of the wrong class, wrong spec, and wearing gear with the wrong bonuses to succeed in raids. If the 40 people in an average Alterac Valley group decided to kick out the 15 least suitable among them and take the remaining 25 to any one of the 25-man raid dungeons, they would not be able to get past the trash mobs. The average player who soloed up to 70, invested some effort in PvP to get epic gear, and now wants to raid, will find himself rejected and laughed at by the top raiding guilds on his server. He'll complain about them being elitist, but in fact it is game design that created the gap between average player and raider. The solofication of MMORPGs creates a large number of characters who simply aren't viable for the top end raid game.
What needs to be done is to rethink the concept of solofication. Why is soloing popular? A part of it is due to Real Life ® contraints, if you solo you can play in smaller bits and bites, group play needs longer periods. But another part of it is just a Skinner box: people like soloing because the game teaches them that soloing is the easiest way to advance. So even if they would have the time for a group, they rather keep on playing solo, because setting up a group is so not worth it. Assembling the group is made complicated by a bad LFG system in WoW. Doing quests that aren't marked a group quests in a group is often bringing less experience points per hour than soloing them. And WoW's concept of teaching players how to group is equivalent of throwing them into deep water to teach him how to swim: some people learn it that way, but many get hurt and frustrated in the process.
Solofication not only opens up a gap to end game raid content, it also moves MMORPGs in a direction where they become vulnerable to competition from single-player games. When I recently asked whether people would play a single-player version of WoW without monthly fees, I was surprised of how many people would prefer such a game over an online MMORPG with monthly fees.
If game design minimizes your interaction with other players, then why pay $15 a month for that interaction?

I think that it is time for the pendulum to swing back towards MMORPGs being more about groups again. Not enforced grouping, nobody wants that. But to a situation where even during the leveling process forming a group would actually be easy and the incentives would encourage it. Where people would learn to cooperate, because it would be to their advantage, and where due to that cooperation they would make more friends and develop stronger social bonds. Where players would arrive at the end game and already know how to play well in a group. Where playing a "support class" like tank or healer was a reasonable choice, and not a niche way for raiders to gimp themselves for the rest of the game. Where MMORPGs would be massively multiplayer again, and not massively singleplayer in parallel, as they are now. Here's hoping.

Source : tobolds.blogspot.com

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Exclusive video of updated Vanguard GU5 spell effects

2008-05-06T11:24:00.001-07:00

Adding a few dozen new mounts to the game and improving the performance would be enough to fill up any ordinary patch, but the Vanguard: Saga of Heroes devs decided to buckle down and improve the spell and combat ability graphics. With a good group casting and using special moves, all with their own flashy graphics, it could get a little hard to see what was going on. Game Update 5 brings new spell animations for druids, sorcerers, disciples and others, which are both faster and better-looking than the old ones.

Click on through to watch the video, and get your fill of the new spell graphics. Then, stop by later today for an interview with Vanguard game designer Lenny Gullo. He'll talk about quests, mounts, hitching, factions, and ten easy recipes for cooking battle lobster.

Source : massively.com

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Virtual Worlds Help In Addiction Therapy

2008-05-05T13:26:00.001-07:00

Virtual worlds are all too often spoken of as something you're in danger of becoming addicted to. We've all heard the stories of inertia, bloat, pallor and unemptied cat trays. But Professor Patrick Bordnick, associate of the University of Houston, is using VR to help treat addictions in the course of therapy.

As Professor Bordnick points out, imagination alone isn't a particularly powerful tool to recreate the situations in which a recovering addict learns to say 'no': 'As a therapist, I can tell you to pretend my office is a bar, and I can ask you to close your eyes and imagine the environment, but you'll know that it's not real'.

Rather than ask the patient to visualise a bar stocked with alcohol or a party where cigarettes are on offer, Bordnick uses a VR helmet along with other components such as olfactory stimulation and actor participation to create a highly plausible and immersive environment. Although the patient consciously knows he is taking part in a VR simulation, the immersion has proven sufficient to build intense cravings, just as if the focus of the addiction had really been present.

By supplying an enviroment that is realistic enough to stimulate cravings but remains controlled and safe, Bordnick can gradually train patients in the use of coping skills. As those skills will have been developed in the face of a close analogue of the real thing, the patient is much better equipped to contend with the challenge of the real-world situation. Source : massively.com

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Warhammer Online Preview

2008-05-03T16:26:00.001-07:00

Crispy Gamer has kicked up a preview of Warhammer Online. The article came via a conference call between editors and developers. Here's a snippet:

Finally, Jeff Hickman ended the call. "Since we are focusing on certain areas, it is very rare that anyone sees the entirety of our game. People don't understand the real depth of what we're doing. There are so many layers of things to do, places to see, rewards, advancement... People often ask us, 'Well, you level from 1 to 40 and then what?' And I just laugh. Our game is not about leveling from 1 to 40. It's about leveling up your guild, going through the campaign, getting one of 20-plus armor sets ... it's a total hobby experience."

"It's very difficult to try to explain because we talk about things like guilds, and people say, 'Yeah we have guilds,' and I say no, no you don't understand, you can level up your guild, assign standard bearers, claim keeps, and we have many other special things we haven't even talked about, yet. There is just so much depth, I wish everybody could see all of the great stuff that we're doing."

Well, Mr. Hickman, we'll all get a chance to see it soon enough -- in fact, in the fall of 2008.

There are literally tons of nuggets of information in the rest of this article so be sure to head out and read the rest at Crispy Gamer.

Source : WarCry Network

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Age of Conan: Role Playing Server Rules

2008-05-02T21:39:00.001-07:00

These are the rules we are considering for the Roleplaying-tagged servers for Age of Conan.

We are extremely interested in the feedback of our hardcore roleplayers on this issue and hope you will let us know your thoughts in this thread. Please note nothing is final. We're planning a meeting to talk out some of the issues we're already seeing, so now is the perfect time to give us your input.

Preliminary Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Roleplaying Server Rules

All names must fit within the universe of Hyboria. Sephiroths or Pikachus or names that are out of place with the setting are not permitted. This is in addition to our usual naming policy (for example, no copyrighted names).

No names (or obviously similar names) may be those used in the works of Robert E. Howard. Conan, Kohnan, Konan, Kohnan are all examples of names that are forbidden under this policy.

Please avoid Out of Character (OOC) chat as much as possible in the public channels. You are welcome to discuss whatever you like in your guild channels or in private messages. Examples of Out of Character chat include sports events, the weather, what you had for lunch, internet memes, catchphrases, and so on.

Please respect roleplayers. We recognize that not everyone is willing or able to maintain a persona at all times, and we welcome you to enjoy the atmosphere. However, please do not insult or harass the people in character, call them silly, or otherwise try to ruin their immersion.

Harassment and other behaviors covered in the rules of conduct are still covered on roleplaying servers. "I'm just roleplaying a homicidal maniac" is not an excuse for harassing, griefing, etc., other players. This extends to racism/nationalism as well. Roleplaying someone that hates Stygians/Aquilonians/Cimmerians is perfectly alright, however, real world racism is not acceptable.

Player-run events, guild meetings, and other roleplaying sessions may be present at anytime. Please do not interfere or harass players that are in character or running an event. We encourage you to join in and have a good time, but disrupting a wedding, guild meeting, etc. for non-roleplaying reasons may be cause for punishment.

Please keep in mind this is a mature setting for an M-rated game and the roleplay setting and environment may not be suitable for all players and temperaments. Likewise, while this is an M-rated game, please keep in mind that even in Hyboria, there are standards of conduct. Please keep overt and detailed adult conduct and chat in private channels.

In addition to the official rules provided by Funcom, the roleplaying community may have its own rules and customs. We encourage you to observe these as much as possible on your server of choice.

Source : WarCry

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Age of Conan Open Beta Writeup

2008-05-02T10:34:00.001-07:00

The Age of Conan Open Beta began yesterday afternoon. I have been looking forward to this opportunity to test the game again so that I can further solidify my feelings about the game and determine once and for all if I will be playing AoC at release. It is my intention in this writeup to convey my true opinion on what I have experienced from levels 1-13 and then pass judgment on the parts of the game that I have played. I acknowledge that this is beta and the servers are being stress tested. However, anyone who believes that this is not what will be released in 16 days +/- a few bugs is a fool. Anyone with past open beta experience knows first hand that this is the game you will be playing at launch. Now let's get to the goods.
PvE Leveling Experience Levels 1-13, the story and more

Tortage at nightDuring the Gamespot pvp weekend I was able to level from 1-6 in the singleplayer starting area. That means I had 7 levels of unexplored territory and adventures to experience. I created a Dark Templar Soldier Class because I am most interested in playing one at release. The first thing I noticed when I began fighting NPCs was that Funcom had upped the difficulty ever so slightly. It wasn't long though before I began 2 shotting Picts and obliterating these mini-bosses finding myself out of the 1-6 starting area and outside of Tortage itself. Outside of Tortage is a NPC who gave me a very simple task to gain access to the city. I wasn't allowed to enter until I had my slave shackles removed. He sent me to a blacksmith about 50 feet away who offered to help me, but I had to get him some bricks. To get the bricks I had to run up a hill about 45 seconds away and left click 3 bricks. Bringing the bricks back to the smith he removed my shackles and I was granted access to Tortage. My very first quest in Hyboria completed and although it was lackluster, it was neat.

As I entered Tortage it became immediately clear that the standard method of leveling in AoC would be questing. As far as the eye could see, and cluttering my mini-map, were orange exclamation points with NPCs offering me quests. I'm not going to give you a recounting of each one but the majority were "Go here and kill X of Y" and "Pick this up off the ground across town for me and bring it back". Very standard questing and not something that hurts and helps my impressions of the game. When I reached level 7 I decided it was time to begin the singleplayer quest line again. In this Tortage area Night Time represents singleplay and Day Time represents multiplayer.

The singleplayer quest line was decent. The central focus of the story arc is to help free Tortage from its the Tyrant who bastardized the brotherhood that used to govern the city. This Tyrant has blockaded the harbor and made life miserable for the residents of Tortage. The missions and story from here on remained interesting and moving towards a solution. They involved visiting an island to rescue an agent of Conan, finding the lost brother of the bar maid, and the beginning of learning my true purpose in Hyboria from my mentor/trainer. All in all it's nothing to get excited about or declare revolutionary but the story and leveling from 1-13 are about as good as one can ask for in a mmorpg.

It's worth mentioning that I had a really big Guild Wars vibe with how the world was instanced. There is this slash command that lets you change which instance of the world you are in. This was the cause for many people's frustrations when they could not locate their party members who were supposed to be standing at the same location. I don't like instanced worlds because they break immersion completely. But it's a lesser evil I suppose.
How about the polish? Everyone's favorite word.

The game definitely has areas lacking polish. I feel the questing system needs to be polished up to at least the standards set by WoW (king of Polish). Running through the town is a great example of where the game needs polish because there are invisible walls and pathing issues all around — it feels clunky sometimes. Additionally there are even problems with combat that need polish. When fighting mobs they sometimes disappear and reappear or mobs add from miles away. It feels like it's almost there but that "Feeling" you get when you're playing a completely fine tuned game isn't there yet. Fixable. Very, very fixable.
Combat and other Mechanics of the available Gameplay

Nothing really changed from levels 1-13. Fighting a NPC at level 10 feels the same as it did fighting one back at level 3. The only difference is that I have a few extra combos that require me to press a few more buttons. It's very evident that their system used to be designed like EQ2's old system with classes being available at level 20 and a basic archetype being played through levels 1-19. Why? Because all of the characters in a archetype feel almost identical right now and share many abilities.

If I'm going to be completely honest here I must mention that the constant pressing of buttons is borderline buttonmashing for me. Graev has already come right out and said it is definitely buttonmashing. The combat system is still pseudo-twitch in my eyes and even more so in PvE now that Funcom raised the difficulty level. However, I am now questioning whether or not the system is revolutionary like Funcom claims. There really is something to be said about auto attacking. Up until now I felt like I didn't need it, but I find myself really wondering if the removal of auto attack has turned what could have been a revolutionary system into something that will, over time, grow very old and indeed feel buttonmashing. Can I really sit here and press all these buttons for months? That's a question that I need to answer for myself. Thankfully my G15 keyboard can macro the combos… but at the same time practically reverting the combo system back to standard mmo 1 button presses.

There are some really great PvE mechanics and features that have me still excited about the system. For example, I love the fatalities. Once you learn how to execute them more often the combat capabilities of your character will really open up. I have found that the best way to execute a fatality is to execute a combo that will kill the enemy on the last hit in a place where his shielding is most weak. Once you execute the fatality you are given an enormous bonus to stamina and other things which REALLY helps in boss fights and big battles. Most of the time I find myself less interested in my objective and more interested in trying to see my Dark Templar cut off a guys head! Fatalities give Conan's combat a soul.
Crashes and glitches and bugs, oh my! Performance Issues aplenty…

Before I begin listing the issues I encountered I want to make one thing VERY clear. YES, I acknowledge my system is "medium" and YES I acknowledge again that this is beta. I even acknowledge that Funcom might have been silly enough to provide this open beta with an older client than the one being shipped in release. When the game isn't having these issues it's actually quite pleasant. I'm getting 40+ frames with my current settings and I actually think the game is STILL the most beautiful mmorpg on the market at low-medium settings!! HOWEVER, these issues were still something that impacted my experience with the game incredibly. These are not issues with my system. These are issues on Funcom's end.

The following are just a few of the problems I encountered.

Consistent crashing to desktop - I crashed to desktop several dozen (yes, you read that right) times yesterday with a so many different reasons and errors that I stopped keeping track. I submitted a report each time to Funcom.

Multiple system crashes - My PC would lockup at the exact same point in-game when I tried to enter the tavern at night time. I am not alone here. Many others are experiencing this same issue. When I get this lockup I must hard reset my PC.

Falling through the world - I fell through the world more than a half dozen times yesterday. The results of each incident were nearly identical leaving me under the world in a body of water with one option … drown myself to get back to the bind point. 50% of the time I fell through the world my system would crash or I would crash to desktop.

BSOD - I had my first BSOD in 3 years lastnight. It happened while talking to a NPC. Suddenly my system locked up and a BSOD appeared. It mentioned something about my display driver which I assume means it crashed.

Server Disconnections - Acceptable for a stress test. I can't complain here. However they were plentiful.

Hanging on Loading - Three times last night the game would hang while loading into a room. I would be forced to CTRL ALT DEL and end the process.

Additional problems worth mentioning: Getting stuck in instances, falling through bridges and ramps, Npc's missing, party members being invisible or in another instance of the world altogether.

I can sum this up in 1 word: Vanguard. Yep, I said the V word. Crucify me in your nerd rage if it makes you feel better but this MUST be said. The game's stability is even worse than Vanguard right now. If this is an older client and these issues were fixed (which some people have the audacity to claim) then why is Funcom subjecting us to them? That's not only poor business but inefficient testing. I don't think they are that stupid. That leads me to assume that these issues are NOT fixed and one of the purposes of testing is to help them find solutions — which I am more than happy to do. Ultimately the bottom line is still ever clear in my eyes that this game releases in 16 days and my last impressions of the game will be that it worked against me when I tried to enjoy it.
Overall what do I think? Will I be putting money into this game?

Overall I think the gameplay is good. There is an interesting story with a quasi unique combat system. The gameplay is "standard" mmorpg. It's a quest-centric leveling design with raids planned for end-game and PvP. The potential for an above average mmorpg is there. But right now it's being overshadowed by horrible performance issues and stability.

I have two goals for the next few days. 1) To see if I truly want to play the game and 2) To inform those who read my blog whether or not I feel that AoC is a good mmorpg worth thier money. Before Gamespot's pvp weekend I was 100% playing Conan. After The pvp weekend I was 75% sure. After experiencing all of open beta's content I am now 40% sure. I have felt these feelings before. I had them with Vanguard. I pushed them aside and I got the game and it came back to haunt me. I'm not sure that I can do that again.

I'm going to be blunt. Funcom is lucky that WAR was delayed and Mythic should be kicking themselves that their game wasn't ready in time to go against AoC. If these two games went head to head then AoC would have been obliterated and unless Funcom turns things around before Fall that's precisely what will happen. Sorry if you disagree, but that is the truth of my opinion.

I'm going to play some more of Open beta and pray they fix these issues. You've heard this before, right? "Good game but horrible stability."

Source : www.keenandgraev.com

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9 Free MMOs Worth Playing

2008-04-28T17:03:00.000-07:00

Today I got my latest issue of PCGamer where they played over 60 different free MMOs and selected 9 as worth playing. I figured you guys could get some good use out of this list so here it is.

Crime Craft

Sort of like GTA except with more crime and less driving around. It uses the Unreal Engine 3 and isn’t set to be released until Spring of 2009, so its about a year away but it’ll be free to play.

www.crimecraft.com

Mythos

No suprise to see Mythos making the list. We’ve covered Mythos before, but if your not familiar with it it’s a Diablo2 clone, but a MMORPG instead of a regular RPG.

www.mythos.com

Requiem: Bloodymare

An extremely gory and bloody horror MMORPG that lives up to its name. Originally created in South Korea the game has made its way to western audiences. Currently the game is in Beta, but will be released shortly.

www.playrequiem.com

Dungeon Runner

A comical MMORPG that is a lot of fun to play and is free as long as you allow them to run an ad banner while your playing. However for only $4.99/month you have the option to remove that.

www.dungeonrunners.com

Sword of the New World: Granado Espada

An MMORPG with an anime look that at one point had a monthly fee but is now free to play. Sword of the New World allows you to control up to 3 characters which separates it from all the other MMOs out there.

swordofthenewworld.com

Holic

Currently in open beta, Holic is a MMO with a very cutsie look. What seperates this game from others is that users are able to create there own dungeouns and quests once they get far enough into the game.

holic.netgame.com

Shaiya: Light and Darkness

We covered Shaiya before so its no suprise to us that PC Gamer selected it as one of the best free games out there. Shaiya concentrates on long term development of your character and heavy PvP action. If you ever played Lineage, this game is right up your alley.

shaiya.aeriagames.com

Fiesta

Another anime inspired MMORPG from Korea, however this one suffers from horribly translated dialog. Aside from the bad translations, Kiesta is a good looking game with solid game play.

fiesta.outspark.com

Cabal Online

A solid fantasy MMORPG that doesn’t really make any breakthroughs, but features good gameplay, story and PvP via duels. Considering its free to play, if your looking for a casual free fantasy MMO, this could be the one for you.

www.cabalonline.com

Source : www.mmocrunch.com

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The lifecycle of an EverQuest 2 hotfix

2008-04-28T03:10:00.001-07:00

EverQuest 2 Associate Producer Jennifer Gerull posted an entry on the official EQ2 developer's blog the other day, discussing the process involved in pushing out a hotfix to the game. Though she equates herself to 'George Jetson with longer hours', endlessly pushing buttons all day, it's an interesting look into Sony Online Entertainment's revision process.

As Gerull describes it, code fixes are pushed to an internal server, where the QA department can take a look at them. If the build of the game compiles nicely, it's reviewed by Quality Assurance to ensure the changes are working as intended. If the build doesn't compile nicely, some poor developer gets saddled with "a really ugly doll named 'BoB' that gets to sit on their desk until the next coder gets the "Breaker of the Build" title."

While most of the time the team waits patiently for QA to do its work, important hotfixes result in rushed phone calls and nervous waiting. Inelegantly applied solutions can have the QA team sending one or two of the items on the hotfix list back to the coding team, which in turn requires Jennifer to start a new internal update. She notes that each internal update is labeled with a letter, starting with A and working down. "A few times I've gotten all the way to L, M and N builds, but that is usually the exception rather than the rule on the number of iterations in one day. By the time we get to N, its usually time to go home and try again the next day." Make sure to read on for the full view of this process, and hints of future developer updates to come.

Source : Massively.com

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Champions Online preview hints at villains

2008-04-25T20:29:00.001-07:00

The guys over at 1up.com have a great two page preview/interview covering Champions Online. The preview itself covers quite a bit, including Cryptic's time with the Marvel MMO, customization in Champions Online, combat, the Xbox 360 version and of course some hints at what we may see for villains. Overall the preview expands on a lot of these subjects, with quotes for Jack Emmert giving away a detail or two here and there.

The big tease about the villains has really piqued our curiosity, as Emmert says, "But it's something we're thinking about in Champions: Is the gameplay experience the same for a hero and a villain? But that's part of our top-secret plan we're not talking about."

A lot of people on the official forums have been clamoring for some kind of villain gameplay and Cryptic has previously shown they pay attention to the community. We would love to see the villain side play dramatically different from the hero side of Champions Online. The big question left to Cryptic is exactly how villains will be a different experience from heroes? By: Massively.com

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Stargate Worlds: Overview

2008-04-24T13:58:00.001-07:00

Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment has partnered with MGM Interactive to adapt the popular Stargate television franchise into an online world. Powered by the Unreal 3.0 engine and staffed by MMO veterans from around the industry, Stargate Worlds allows players to experience this rich and varied universe in a new way.

The team set out to translate real world tactical combat into their MMO. While tactics will be closer to reality, the game is by no means a first-person shooter. It employs RPG mechanics. In MMOs, combat has developed a life of its own that only vaguely resembles reality. This is not the case for Stargate. Players must operate as a team, find cover and chose their spots. Their AI enemies will.

"The last thing we want to see in our world is a bunny-hopping Jaffa," Lead Designer Dan Elggren.

The initial release of Stargate Worlds concentrates primarily on the recently cancelled Stargate SG-1 television series. The show ran for a decade, and has become a favorite in sci-fi circles. Stargate: Atlantis, according to Cheyenne Mountain, is likely to be included in an expansion pack.

While tactical combat is the signature of this game, the team also promises to go the extra mile to capture some other elements of the TV series. For example, puzzles will be a large part of the gameplay experience, something not often done in mainstream MMORPGs. The team also hopes to include combat-alternatives, such as diplomacy. The TV series was never just about gun fights, and Stargate Worlds reflects that.

Players advance in SGW through a range of archetypes closely identifiable with characters from the original series. For example, the Archeologist would be similar to Daniel Jackson from SG-1.

Stargate Worlds remains in early development. No projected launch information is available at this time.

By : WarCry Network

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Lineage II: Choose Your Destiny This Summer

2008-04-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

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In commemoration of the Hellbound update, eligible players will have the opportunity to swap their main class with one of their subclasses. Change your main class to one of your subclasses and enjoy playing Lineage II with a character that you love even more!

Participation & Duration Information

Those who wish to participate in the event can do so by submitting a request through the homepage. The requests made before each weekly scheduled maintenance will take effect at the following weekly scheduled maintenance.

Eligibility & Requirements

Each character can swap his or her main class only once; however, the request can be canceled before it goes into effect, and resubmitted again.
If you first request an account service (character gender change, character name change, or server transfer), you cannot request the main class change. Please resubmit your request on the following week after the account service goes into effect.
Once you change a character's class, the change is final and cannot be reversed. Please submit your request carefully.

Eligible Character Levels

In order to participate in this event, your desired character's main class must be between levels 75 and 80, and the subclass level must be 75 or above.
Cross-Race Limitations

Characters whose main class is a Warsmith, Maestro, Overlord, or Dominator are not eligible for this event.
If you have both Elf and Dark Elf classes as your subclasses, you cannot request one of them to be your main class since both of them can't have the opposing race's class as a subclass.

Kamael Class Limitations

The Kamael race's Inspector and Judicator are subclass-only by design, so they cannot be changed into a main class. The Kamael have unique occupations that are directly tied to the character's gender, so when you change a Kamael character's class, the gender also changes automatically. For example: If your Kamael character is female and you choose to change your main class to a Berserker, your character's gender will change to male.

Hero Status Restrictions

A Hero character can submit the class-change request only after the Hero period has ended.

Inventory Restrictions

At the time of the class change implementation, if your character is carrying more than 80 items in its inventory, the change will fail. Please check your inventory before the regularly scheduled maintenance to ensure that your character is carrying no more than 80 items.

Other Limitations

A character on the Public Test Server cannot participate in this event.
You cannot participate in this event if your account or character has been banned.
After you submit the class-change request, if your account is banned, the change will not take effect.

FAQ

Q: What's the purpose for having a main class/subclass change event?

A: The Hellbound update introduced a subclass level cap of 80, and a main class level cap of 85. This led to great disappointment among those players who had a greater attachment to their subclass and focused their efforts on developing that subclass. That's why we prepared this main class/subclass change event.

Q: What happens to a character's race/face/gender when the main class and the subclass are changed?

A: When the main and subclass are changed, the character's appearance follows the appearance of the main class. The gender remains the same. (All head styles are type A.) For example, for a female Elf character whose main class is Elder and subclass is Hawkeye, if you request the Hawkeye to become your main class, the main class changes into Hawkeye, the subclass changes into Elder, and the character's appearance changes into a human female character. This works a little differently for the Kamael since their classes are gender-specific. For Kamael, at the time of main/subclass change, the gender also changes into that of the main class.

Q: After changing my main class/subclass, can I revert back to my original state?

A: This offer is limited to one time only per character and you will not be able to revert back to your original state. Please remember this and make your decision very carefully. (You can cancel the request before it goes into effect.)

Q: After changing my main class/subclass, what happens to the subclass certified skills and certificates that I acquired?

A: When you change your main class/subclass, all previously acquired subclass certified skills are reset, and previously acquired certificates are removed. In addition, subclass certificates that were acquired during the certificate exchange event are also removed. You must reacquire the subclass certificates again after the main class/subclass change.

Q: Can I change my second and third sub-class into the main class as well?

A: A request is possible if the main class is between levels 75-80 and the subclass is above level 75, be it the first, second, or third subclass. In this case, the main class changes into the requested second or third sub-class.

Q: Can I participate in the event if my main class is a Warsmith, Maestro, Overlord, or Dominator?

A: Warsmith, Maestro, Overlord, and Dominator are, by design, classes that cannot be subclasses. As such, they cannot be changed into a subclass. If your character's main class is any of these classes, the request cannot be made.

Q: Can the Kamael's hidden subclasses Inspector and Judicator be changed into a character's main class?

A: Inspector and Judicator are designed to be subclasses only, so they cannot be changed into a character's main class.

Q: My main class is Human, my first subclass is Elven, and my second subclass is Dark Elven. In this case, is a request permitted?

A: Within the game, an Elf cannot have a Dark Elf subclass, and a Dark Elf cannot have an Elf subclass. If you have two or more subclasses, and if the one you wish to change into the main class is an Elf or a Dark Elf, the request cannot be made when an opposite race exists in the subclass. In the above example, if a third subclass is a Bounty Hunter, you can request it to become the main class. If one of the opposing race subclasses is deleted, it is possible to choose the remaining subclass as your main class.

Q: What happens to my Olympiad points?

A: Since your main class is changed, your Olympiad points are also reset. Please use up your Olympiad points before submitting the request.

Q: I submitted my request properly but the change hasn't occurred. What could be the reason?

A: If the request was submitted properly but the change didn't take place, this means that the requirements were met at the time of the request but not at the time of effect. Please see the following conditions, double check your character's condition, and submit your request again.

The main class and subclass must be between levels 75-80, and you must not be in hero or hero waiting status.
The character must have 80 or less items in the inventory. If you can hold more than 80 items, you must make sure that you have no more than 80 items in your inventory at the time of the class-change request.
The accounts must not be banned.

Q: Before making the request, I made an account service request. Can I still participate in the event?

A: During a regularly scheduled maintenance, the account service and this main class/subclass change event effect occurs at the same time, so if both requests were permitted, the main class/subclass change would not properly take effect. An account that is already scheduled for an account service cannot submit a class-change event request until the corresponding week. Please keep this in mind, and after the account service takes effect, you may participate in event the following week.

Q: I am working on the quest "Repent Your Sins." Can I continue the quest after changing my main class/subclass?

A: The "Repent Your Sins" quest does not apply to both the main class and subclasses. If you change your main class/subclass, all the items related to the "Repent Your Sins" quest are removed, and you must start the quest over.

Event Schedule

The Choose Your Destiny event will be coming in summer 2008. We will announce more details, including exact dates and times, at a later time.

Sounds like a great opportunity!

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LOTRO : Book 13 Preview

2008-04-22T16:23:00.001-07:00

For players used to the more lush, wooded environments of Lord of the Rings Online, Book 13 may provide a rude awakening. The new zone, Forochel, lies further north than any of the previously accessible regions of Middle Earth, and it's every bit as hostile as you'd expect. Aaron Campbell, Live Producer for LotRO, was kind enough to guide me through the zone and showcase some of the highlights of Book 13 along the way. He explained that the harsh climate there wasn't just a product of its latitude. "[Forochel] is the remnants of the Great Cold that came out of Angmar and settled over the North, so there's a certain edge of corruption to it. It's not only cold, but an unnatural, supernatural cold."

Our tour of the icy wastes of Forochel began along the coast of the frigid Ice Bay. Not the best place for a dip, but the perfect opportunity for Campbell to point out the new environmental damage type that players will contend with as they travel throughout the zone. The cold not only lowers your morale, but places an additional debuff on you that grows more severe over time. This debuff makes it more difficult for you to resist future sources of cold damage, which many of the monsters around Forochel dish out. Fortunately, removing the debuff is as simple as finding a heat source, from a campfire to a nearby steam vent.

We traveled along the coastline until we reached a small fishing outpost controlled by a group of Gauredain. These lanky fellows weren't particularly keen on sharing their real estate with us, but after a few minutes of steel persuasion (aided by our crazy admin powers) we triumphantly reclaimed the hastily constructed hide canopies and bonfires for ourselves. But it was no use: before we could set up our hammocks and crack open a few brews, a group of nomadic Lossoth moved in and put us to work. The Lossoth are a hardy tribe of humans scattered across Forochel that aren't particularly friendly toward you when you first enter the zone. As you liberate their camps from hostile forces and complete quests for them, they gradually begin to realize that you're not there to kill them and entrust you with rare crafting recipes. My character, a Dwarf Guardian, was decked out in crafted Lossoth gear, a stylish Inuit-chic ensemble that grants some extra resistance to the cold.

One Lossoth fisherman politely requested that I do his work for him, and before I knew it I had my first fishing quest. Small problem: my inventory was so bloated with gear that a mere minnow could cause my pack to burst. Solution? Trash some rare and incomparable loot! Likely not a situation that players will encounter, but when you're already invincible, purples and blues lose some of their luster. With some extra space available, I moseyed over to the shoreline and made my first cast. The mechanics of fishing are simple: click the ability once to send out your line, wait for a nibble, then click the ability again to reel in your catch. My first victim was a rare giant goldfish, a modest haul but still rather satisfying for this novice angler.
image

Campbell took this fishing quest as an opportunity to point out some improvements to the quest interface. In Book 13, the quest log will feature easy-to-read visuals that indicate the status of your fellowship members on your current quests. Beyond that, it will be possible for players to look for a fellowship for a specific quest through the quest log itself which should make it even easier to find a group while questing.

With my fishing itch sufficiently scratched (it doesn't take much), Campbell took me to the Lossoth capital, a giant hide dome peppered with bonfires and vendors. Outside the front entrance were four banners corresponding to the four Lossoth outposts in Forochel that are constantly assailed by the expansionist Gauredain; each banner shows whether the corresponding camp is occupied by the Gauredain or the Lossoth. Inside, players who have achieved a certain level of standing with the Lossoth will be able to purchase items and recipes to make their stay in Forochel a little more comfortable.

Campbell elaborated a bit on the challenges of building the Lossoth culture essentially from scratch: The LotRO dev team had little more than a paragraph in the appendix of the Lord of the Rings to work from. So how did they arrive at the appearance and attitude that made it into Book 13? Alex Toplansky, one of the content developers, explains: "Tolkien was really first and foremost a linguist, and he was almost a cultural anthropologist; he had a lot of awareness of a lot of the different European cultures and things going on in that part of the world.

"Without going too far into some of the little trips that we put in with them, there was definitely a little bit of influence from the Sami culture, which appears all throughout the northern Scandinavian band. They're a really interesting people with a lot of attempts to hold onto their heritage very much like a lot of Alaskan and Inuit peoples. We really got kind of carried away and swept into how they went about things. And we learned some really cool stuff that I think comes out in a lot of our content."

The Lossoth aren't without their humor, however. Outside the capital, we encountered a clumsy chap who appeared to be attempting to ice skate for the first time. I asked Campbell if players would every get the chance to skate in Middle Earth. "That's one hurdle we have not been able to climb yet. For the moment, ice skates and sleds are purely the domain of the Lossoth." In other words, it could be a while before you get to body check a Hobbit in a game of Middle Earth hockey. Someday...

We continued along a barren ice sheet populated by the local fauna: a domesticated mammoth, sabertooth cats, and even a few moose. The team argued about the last creature, and after a minute or two of fierce debate, determined that moose are actually members of the elk family. "Welcome to our world," one of the developers interjected with an audible eye-roll.

Moments later, I was told to look up and gaze at Forochel's version of aurora borealis. It was a surprisingly striking, soft purple glow that ebbed and flowed across the horizon. It's certainly far more dramatic than the Northern Lights that I've seen back home in Minnesota, but then again I was less drunk this time around so it's hard to make a direct comparison.
image

The ice sheet spilled into a sparse, taiga-like forest. Campbell explained part of their world-building philosophy for the zone: "We really didn't make excessive use of trees in Forochel. Instead a lot more of it is about ice, about vertical division of landscape, rocks, vistas and viewpoints, a lot more about the decorations items such as mammoths skulls that you'll find across the landscape, and then a few ruins out there as well, in keeping with the sort of ancient nature of the area." Before long we were back onto another ice sheet, this time with substantially more aggressive enemies.

A few wandering ice giants greeted us, and if we weren't all invulnerable they would have certainly brought the pain. Campbell demonstrated an effective tactic for less omnipotent characters to employ: pull the giants to a nearby steam vent and they become much more manageable. Why an ice creature vulnerable to any heat source would make its home near a steam vent is anyone's guess, but Campbell speculates, "Well, you know, they like their sauna." A few paces away, a new monster type floated docilely until I got close enough to aggro it: the Grim, a swirling ice spirit.

From there, Campbell teleported the group to a cavernous ice cave that will greet players as they enter the zone for the first time. This biome is sort of a proof of concept for the LotRO dev team going into the upcoming expansion. It was created using a new process that Campbell called "dual-height map technology," basically a streamlined method for creating large underground spaces. We journeyed through the tunnel, inhabited by a few solitary Grim, before reaching a small Lossoth staging area on the other side. It's a typical woodland biome, covered with a light layer of snow. But the rest of Forochel will expand on the idea of "unnatural, bitter cold," as Campbell puts it.

Speaking of the cold, Campbell gave me a brief demonstration of the new blizzard effects that the developers have added in Book 13. At first, the snowfall seemed rather unremarkable. But as the storm intensified, a more disorienting whiteout effect enveloped my character, making it difficult to even discern the outlines of nearby NPCs. This effect isn't unique to Forochel, either; existing zones like the Misty Mountains will also make use of this mechanic after Book 13 goes live.

Campbell and company then led me into a crystalline ice cavern where the epic questline will culminate. I was cautioned not to reveal too much to players, as there are a few big surprises for those who have been captivated by the story so far. Thankfully, I didn't have a clue what was going on! We followed a sinister bloke through a series of scripted encounters that ended in an open-air chamber with a polished-ice floor. Then things got serious. If we weren't all invulnerable, this is where I would have wiped the group numerous times while running around in circles and marveling at the gorgeous starry sky above us. "We like to pull out the extra stops for the epic quests," Campbell boasted.

Thoroughly exhausted from attempting to pretend like I knew what I was doing, Campbell took pity on me and teleported me to his apartment, where he showed me some of the new items available for display in player housing. Campbell's personal favorite? The Frost Antler head. "Because who can go without a good elk head on the wall?" Campbell added, "I would have said 'moose head,' but I've been corrected."
image

No system exists in a vacuum in LotRO, and the same is true for fishing. The developers are clearly taking a holistic approach to new game mechanics, making sure to weave them into other aspects of the game as they are introduced. "[We] try to extend out some of these systems, as we add in new content to the game, making sure we give that love back to housing, back to other systems in the game such as crafting and cooking," Campbell noted.

We closed the session by taking a look at the Orc Defiler, the new monster-play class that Book 13 will introduce. The Defiler has a lanky, hobbled appearance that is both sinister and a little pathetic. Their main skills are healing and reviving teammates and casting powerful curses on enemy combatants; they have a couple direct-damage attacks but the class was built from the ground up as a primary healer, a role that monster players have clamored for.

The Defiler sports a fetching skull helm with its own upgrade path: You start out wearing a deer skull, then move up to a bear skull, an auroch skull, and finally a drake skull. It's both a cool incentive for monster players wishing to gear out their characters and an indicator of your level of experience to foes. Every member of our party wore a different helm, and while we weren't likely to take anyone down with a group full of primary healers, at least we were guaranteed to stay topped-off during our brief foray into the Ettenmoors.

Source : WarCry Network

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NASA Wants its MMORPG Created for Free

2008-04-22T09:20:00.001-07:00

"It seems that the educational MMORPG NASA's proposing will no longer have a budget of $3 million. Instead, any prospective development partner is being asked to create and maintain the MMORPG for free under a 'non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement'. It won't be a one-sided agreement, though. From NASA's RFP: 'In exchange for a collaborator's investment to create and manage a NASA-based MMO game for fun and to enhance STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], NASA will consider negotiating brand placement, limited exclusivity and other opportunities.'"

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TCoS : New MMO malaise

2008-04-22T09:16:00.001-07:00

I wish I could get really excited about one of the new MMO's coming out.

Warhammer seems to be the biggest hype machine right now, but for all the neat-sounding gameplay offerings, I just don't like the visual feel. It seems kind of lifeless to me, a bit like Everquest 2. Like the buildings are made of cardboard, and the players are painted wooden mannequins. Reminds me a bit of Everquest 2. WO's gameplay may turn out fantastic, but I just don't know that it's a world where I'd actually enjoy spending time.

Conan looks much nicer to me, but I'm kind of iffy about the whole barbaric blood-and-guts vibe. The Conan universe is never something that I've felt drawn to in book or movie form, and my impression of the game isn't feeling that different so far.

Like Conan, The Chronicles of Spellborn has some really beautiful imagery; that looks like a world I think I'd like to spend some time in! Unfortunately I don't have much faith that it's going to be a solid product. For example, their website doesn't clearly explain how TCoS will differentiate itself in a way to make me want to spend dozens or hundreds of hours with it. Instead they spend time explaining to me that resistance rank zero to rank +5 is an exponential curve divided in 64 points, which may be a perfectly good design decision , but is just a tad more detailed than I'm really looking for. And if they can't don't even have a sense for what I, as a consumer, want to see from their website, I'm not too optimistic they're going to have a good sense for what I want to see from their world.

So I'm waiting to see what 38 Studios and BioWare have up their sleeves, and keeping my fingers crossed.

Source : KillTenRats.com

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City of Heroes: “Issue 12″ Briefing Video

2008-04-21T19:04:00.001-07:00

CITY OF HEROES: View the new CITY OF HEROES: Issue 12 video which shows and tells all a hero needs to know about Villain Archetypes. Are you listening heroic one? I SAID…"Are you listening?!!"

"Infiltrate the Arachnos organization from within! Upon reaching level 50, Villains unlock two new Epic Archetypes; Wolf Spiders and Blood Widows. They have their own unique storyline and missions, power combinations and costume sets. Branching powersets allow the Wolf Spider to specialize as either a Bane Spider or Crab Spider and the Blood Widow chooses from the Fortunata and Night Widow branches. Each brings with it unique costumes for your Arachnos duties, as well as your newfound role as a Destined One."

Source : GameBunny

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WoW Journal - 21-April-2008

2008-04-21T08:44:00.001-07:00

I haven't played all that much World of Warcraft this weekend, I'm feeling a bit burned out for the moment. Having problems finding groups for 5-man dungeons, the only thing I did with my level 70 characters was doing a couple of daily quests for the Shattered Sun Offensive with my mage. I reached honored with them, and bought the two enchanting recipes you get from them at that level, one of which is Void Shatter, which transforms one cheap void crystal into two expensive large prismatic shards. But although I could learn that recipe at my 360 skill, when I tried to use it I couldn't. The recipe requires a runed eternium rod, which can only be made at 375 skill. Why on earth does the game have lower skill recipes requiring something you can only achieve with a higher skill?

Fortunately the other recipe was more useful, as it was orange at my skill level, and required "only" about 40 gold worth of materials. So I used that 15 times at a cost of 600 gold in materials (most of which I had in stock) to get to 375 skill in enchanting. And that on the same day where by making my second shadowweave item I also reached 375 tailoring with my mage. Great! Of course then I spend another fortune to make that runed eternium rod, which uses 4 primal mights among other expensive ingredients. All that financial effort certainly wasn't worth it for the Void Shatter, but that wasn't why I did it. Rather I thought that having your tradeskills maxed will be important for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, as you probably can't get the new recipes without having reached the old skill cap.

I spent more time on my other server playing Alliance, but even there my new gnome rogue only made it to level 16 yet. But an extremely well equipped level 16, having run the Deadmines several times with the help of my wife's level 68 rogue. In return I used my level 60 priest, who I moved to that server, to run her level 18 shaman through the Deadmines too. Can you believe that after over 3 years of WoW that was only the second time she saw a dungeon? But as there are quite some nice pieces of leather armor and weapons for rogue and shamans in that dungeon, it was well worth it, and fun. As the wife and me have radically different play styles, we don't play together all that often.

So I'm still doing quests until level 20 in the Draenei starting area. Only that every two levels I have to hearthstone to Shattrath, and teleport to another Alliance city to train my rogue. Exodar, the Draenei city, doesn't have a rogue trainer. And the rogue class quests (I just learned lockpicking) are also in the old cities. I'm keeping my World of Warcraft playing at low activity for the moment, I just don't feel like playing more. But I don't want to play other "old" MMORPGs either. I signed up for the Fileplanet Age of Conan open beta, and pre-ordered that game, just to give it a chance. I don't really have high hopes that this is the game for me, but at least it is new, and I can't judge a game without having played it. I'm a bit nervous about how their release will be, because Age of Conan is made by Funcom, whose previous MMORPG Anarchy Online still holds the record for the worst MMORPG release ever, and I was right in the middle of that one. Here's hoping they learned from their mistakes.

By : Tobold

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The Wisdom of MMO Banking

2008-04-20T14:50:00.001-07:00

Does it seem strange to save up to buy a house in a game? We are in an era where the real world economies of some nations are paralyzed by debts incurred from home purchases. Yet in games where there is player housing there is a surprising lack of player debt. MMOGs offer a simplified financial system seemingly impervious to the ills of modern society. What could we as a gaming society learn about real-world finance and money management from the way we act in game?

I game lending is, at least theoretically, possible between players. Years ago, while playing Ultima Online: Renaissance, I had what might be the closest thing to a mortgage in a MMOG. Due to the restriction of having only one house per account per server (similar to the way Lord of the Rings Online does it), a friend who was trying to be an in-game real estate broker asked me to hold a small villa in Felucia on my account while he found a buyer. I agreed, but also asked how much he wanted for it (200K gp, in case you're curious – and want a good laugh). At the time, I did not have enough money but I offered to put a down-payment of 50K gp on it and let him know when the rest was available. He agreed. It was probably the cheapest way to get a house at the time short of actually buying the building permit from the housing broker and trying to find an empty plot to put it on – which was a losing proposition anyway.

All MMOGs have some sort of cash storage system. In LotRO and Final Fantasy XI, all money is carried on the character allowing for it to be used at any time for purchases throughout the world. In World of Warcraft, gold is primarily stored on the toon, but may also be put into a guild bank deposit for use by multiple players. Think of this as a joint savings account. In games like Ultima Online and Runescape, gold may be stored in the bank, like a savings account, or on the character. Only what is in the character's coin purse may be used, thus making it more difficult to spend large amounts all at once. And though UO offers a check writing function, in order to carry larger denominations of gold without having to use up your storage weight with coins, it is not a checking account system. If games are meant to be fantastic, idealized worlds, does that mean finance has no place in our dreams?

By using a savings-only banking system, MMOGs force players to evaluate their purchases carefully and make choices between otherwise similarly-valued goods. In order to purchase more costly items, the player must plan and save for it. For those games where gold may be stored in the player's bank account, they must then make the run back to a bank, get the funds, and then proceed to wherever the item may be purchased. It takes time: time to grind, loot, craft, farm, or otherwise earn the gold required – time during which they are thinking about whether it is worth all of this to have whatever it is they're after. Some players are even willing to put in this time in order to buy virtual items repeatedly on different characters. How many of your level 70s in WoW have epic flying mounts?

But when it comes to the real world, instant gratification must be obeyed. Instead of saving up for the car of your dreams, it could be financed through the seller or dealership in order to obtain it sooner. Rather than paying cash for a house, most borrowers (at least in the United States) get a mortgage for the majority of the cost. This is a feature strikingly lacking in MMOGs. And when you think of the fact that these are fantasy worlds, it makes you wonder whether the devs are trying to hearken back to a less intricate time financially.

Yet while it's plausible that players could lend one another money, there is precious little of this type of transaction. I also have yet to find a game that offers loans. The games themselves do not offer them and they certainly don't promote that players do so. And yet no one is phased by this.

So why is it that we're willing to save in a game but not in real life? Well, the short answer is self selection bias. We choose to be in the game and do whatever it is we do. It is not a societal requirement in the game that we craft or quest (though it helps if you want to experience content). It is our choice how we spend our time and in-game money. Therefore we are more interested in doing it. The lack of opportunity to buy on credit helps us escape the real world just that little bit more. We enter a place not set up around money itself but rather on the goods and services that money helps us trade.

There's a sense of glee when you save enough to buy your first epic mount or a nice little player house to proudly display the loot you've collected in your exploits. You've worked hard for all that. Scrimped and saved your gold, credits, gil, and so forth. In this way, can games teach financial responsibility by providing elation after accomplishing financial goals?

By : Alexis Kassan

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Mythos Hands On

2008-04-20T14:10:00.001-07:00

Computer & Video Games editors had a chance at a hands on look at Mythos, the upcoming free-to-play MMO from Flagship Studios. The article has brief descriptions of the three included character classes and spends quite a bit of time comparing Mythos to the Diablo series. After all, editors opine, Mythos is the brainchild of Flagship, whose founders were those who created the Diablo franchise.

At this stage, there are no details on what exactly will cost money, but there's little to suggest cash investments will be vital.But aside from being free, Mythos is simply one of the most addictive MMOs I've played.

While it lacks the depth and narrative of its peers, it makes up for it by having such tight and moreish gameplay. Skills need tweaking, but the beta should fix all that.

Even this early stage, Mythos has more spit, polish and gameplay to it than any other free-to-play MMO out there. It's exciting, addictive and pleasing to the eye, and there's little to dissuade you from giving it a try. Look out for the open beta this spring.

At this point, it appears that the game is a worthy successor to Diablo II. It will remain to be seen if the high expectations live up to the hype.

Source : WarCry

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Champions Online: Breaking the Wall

2008-04-20T11:47:00.001-07:00

This is the first of a two-part series about the field of game design. This first article talks about how to break the wall and get into game design. The second part will detail a bit about how design works from the inside.

At one point or another, most people who play games have probably at least entertained the thought of getting into game design professionally. Game design isn't like law or medicine though - there's no bar or exam to pass, so how exactly does one break into the field?

The most important thing to realize about breaking into game design is that it is very much subject to the laws of supply and demand. There are very few game design jobs of any sort available, and there are a whole lot of people who want to be designers. And many of the people applying for the few open game design positions are not strangers to the industry, either. In addition to people in areas like QA or CSR, it is not uncommon to see programmers or artists want to switch fields.

Different developers will have different biases and be looking for different things, but there are ways you can better position yourself to dramatically improve your chances of breaking in to the industry.

First, while it is not impossible to come in off the street and get a game design position, it is very, very unlikely. Internships are available from some places as well, and if you can find one can be a highly effective shortcut.

While "game designer" is not generally an entry-level position, what you can do is get a job that is an entry-level position, but that is a recognized feeder into game design. If you are already a programmer or an artist, both of these are in parallel areas of game development that work very closely with design, and as such are superb ways of cracking the wall.

What if you don't know code and your idea of art is drawing stick figures? You're not out of luck, but the path is a little longer. Publishers will almost always have large QA (Quality Assurance) and CSR (Customer Service) departments, and developers will usually have at least the first, and occasionally the second. QA departments at developers tend to be smaller and have better access to the developer, so they are generally a better route into game design. But because there are generally fewer available positions, competition can also be fiercer.

If you wind up with a job in QA or CSR at a publisher, never fear. Publishers also frequently run their own first-party development studios which occasionally have openings, and it is perfectly possible to move from a publisher position to a similar position at an outside developer.

Secondly, because there are so many applicants for so few positions, it can help to have ways to distinguish yourself. For this, I can tell you a secret:

Creativity is good, but it isn't primarily about the creativity.

What? Heresy! No, truth. Everyone - designer, programmer, artist, QA, CSR, marketing or executive - is convinced their ideas are the best, the most creative, the most interesting and the most innovative. A designer certainly should be creative, and being creative will definitely get you noticed, but it's generally not what will close the sale.

What will close the sale is the ability to demonstrate professionalism, practicality, understanding of the way development works and the relative costs and risks of different paths. Most importantly of all, however, is the clear ability to check your ego at the door and identify the best approach or design regardless of whether or not you were the one to think of it.

Game design is still a job, and it's amazing how frequently people forget this. All of the factors that apply to any other job - professionalism, courtesy, responsibility, confidence and diplomacy - all apply equally well in this field. Although game development is generally more informal than many other fields, it is still a business, and it is important to remember this.

Finally, being a game designer is not the same thing as being a game player. This sounds obvious, but in interview wrap-ups it is one of the points that comes up again and again. Obviously, you need to be able to enjoy playing games and to identify what aspects of gameplay are fun - this goes without saying. What you also have to do, however, is to separate the "game player" hat from the "game designer" hat, and start asking a whole new set of questions.

What is fun? Why is it fun? What alternative approaches could be envisioned? What are the risks and consequences to other systems for each alternative approach? What principles of the game must be adhered to in order to maintain the vision of the game or company? What resource restrictions are there - it might be great to have another year to polish something, but what do you do if you don't have an extra year to polish?

Above all, it can take a lot of persistence and a lot of patience to break the wall and get your foot into the world of game development. But if you do, the rewards are unmatched.

By : champions-online.com

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Vanguard: Sneak Peek at Update 5

2008-04-18T19:26:00.001-07:00

Hey all! You should expect to see Game Update 5 on the Test sever after the weekend! Below is an outline of the main features included in the final update - please note though that they are not all fully implemented yet. As you play through the content on the test server, please keep an eye open for any bugs and be sure to submit a "/bug" for any you find - particularly in regards to particles not displaying correctly. Thanks, and enjoy!

Game Update #5

1. Racial Mounts
2. Class Updates
3. Anti-Hitching
4. New Particles

1. RACIAL MOUNTS
We have added a unique racial mount for each race in Vanguard! The mounts can be attained through a series of faction based quests that can be started in each race's home town. If you happen to like another race's mount better than your own though, worry not! With the appropriate faction, players will be able to complete any of the quests.

Can't wait until the weekend's over to get a peek at the new racial mounts? Select fansites have additional exclusive shots of these awesome mounts! Be sure to be on the lookout if you want to catch an early glimpse!
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Citizen Favor
The citizens of Telon are seeking adventurers to help spread their influence across the land. By seeking out a faction registrar you can don the banner of a city, gaining favor with its citizens while you battle their enemies. Each creature that is slain will offer a chance to receive tokens bearing the symbol of their registered city. These tokens can be returned to the city in exchange for citizen faction. Be warned that while many factions are friendly with each other, all factions have those that oppose them. Raising your faction with one city may reduce your faction with another. While you can switch factions at any time, those who are worried about becoming outlaws in certain cities should heed this warning.

Gaining faction will allow you to purchase factional rewards with the use of platinum tokens. These tokens can only be retrieved from the vilest of beings and only when you are wearing the banner of your chosen city. Those powerful enough to defeat raid NPCs will receive ancient coins which can be converted into a platinum token of any type you desire.

Racial Mounts
With the release of the citizen favor system comes the first factional rewards -- racial land mounts! All races have been granted a unique looking mount with improved speed over other mounts in their tier. These mounts can be attained at levels 30 and 50 after you have gained the required faction and number of platinum coins. Players will be able to get any of these mounts as long as they do the work involved for their attached cities.
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2. CLASS UPDATES
This update we have given significant attention to three more classes. Blood Mages, Psionicists and Sorcerers have all received a lot of developer attention. Abilities that may have been broken before have been fixed, spells have been tweaked and upgraded or updated and all three classes should be more in line with their intended vision in terms of power and utility. Specific tweaks and updates will be listed in the patch notes.

3. ANTI-HITCHING
As always, increasing performance remains a high priority for our development team. To that end, with this update we will be introducing new anti-hitching code that should have an immediate and noticeable effect.

4. NEW PARTICLES
Sometimes, things just need to look cooler. That was the case for many adventuring class spells and/or abilities. Blood Mages, Disciples, Dread Knights, Druids, Necromancers and Sorcerers all received new an improved particle effects.

Source : WarCry Network

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Lord of the Rings Online : Orc Defiler

2008-04-18T19:04:00.001-07:00

Lighting flashed across the sky, briefly casting the forest in a sickly green glow. The wood was quiet, as the battle that had been waged beneath its boughs moved on to another venue. The only sound, other than the steady hum of insects, was of a small fire in a desolate hollow. The green flames of the small campfire crackled and hissed against the jagged stones, their smoky tendrils licking greedily at the pot of bubbling yellow putrescence perched above.

The sound of the fire was punctuated by the gasping moans from a misshapen figure lying amongst the bones littering the ground; the stench of festering wounds signaling the life quickly sliding away from the twisted form.

From a dark corner of the hollow a Defiler emerged; light leather straps crossed his body and a massive bear skull sat upon his brow. His flesh was black as night and covered in red runes and scars carved from the long years of service to Angmar. In one hand he clutched a massive wooden staff, adorned with bits of bone hanging from stretched sinew, while the other toted a gourd filled with a foul-smelling concoction. Uttering a guttural word in the Black Tongue, he stepped toward the fire, sending grey filth into the air.

Leaning his staff against the curve of the hollow, the Defiler made his way to the shattered orc form amidst the bones. The fallen beast howled in rage and pain as his chest wound was pulled open by an uncaring hand. With the full breadth of the putrefying wound exposed, the Defiler worked quickly, pouring the contents of his gourd into the wound while uttering the dark phrases taught him by his master and the masters of his past. The fallen orc ceased to howl, and fell into a fitful sleep as vile liquid spilled from the wound, bubbling and sizzling as it knitted him back together.

As he moved toward the fire, the Defiler reached into the cauldron and filled his gourd with the thick grey-green slime and returned to the sleeping form of the orc, where he applied a dollop of the filth to each of the pustules on the orc's legs. Wound by wound, the disease retreated from the slime. It would be hours before the orc was mended whole once more, but the Defiler, done with his work, called out into the night.

Two Uruks, clad in black iron bearing the symbol of the Krahjarn tribe, appeared from the gloom and hoisted the wounded orc from the dirt floor. As they removed their fallen servant into the night, another of Mordírith's soldiers was deposited unceremoniously into the cave. With a dismissive wave to the troll delivering the new wounded, the Defiler retreated to the darkness of the hollow to scrape fungus from the walls and return to his night's work.

A Message from Akulhún:

"All right, maggots! Mordírith's grown tired of you whining wretches and sent us Defilers from the sulfur swamps and wastes of Angmar to plug your bleedin' wounds and make those lily-loving Free People suffer! All your belly-achin' and screamin' finally yielded somethin' other than my whip! Well, maggots, that make me angrier than ever -- I'll not spare the lash from any of you spineless curs for any longer!

"We're at war here in the Ettenmoors and that means you fight and die for Angmar. You only see fit to whimper and drag your feet, tuck your tails, shoulder your weapons, and flee when War Leaders tell you to fight on... but no longer, sluggards! I'll not bear another visit from Lugbûrz. That happens and I start crackin' 'eads! Now... treat the Defilers with a fair bit o' respect. Give them defense when they need it and slaughter the Free People! The Defilers will be by your side makin' the Free People weak of resolve, weak of strength, and weak of faith. When you bleed, they'll see your wounds closed...if...you decide to whine and cower they'll let me know and then you'll feel the sting of my whip on your back shortly before they turn their talents to bringing about the greatest pain you have ever known...maggots!"

A New Addition to Monster Play

Monster play, where LOTRO players can don the wolf's clothing amongst the sheep by becoming an orc, Uruk, spider or Warg, is adding a new face to the fray. Players have long enjoyed the utility of their numerous classes and multitude of skills, and with the addition of the new orc Defiler; we are taking a step toward filling out the arsenal available to monster players. Hailing from lands filled with toxins and disease, the orc Defiler uses his knowledge of these virulent fungi and slime to aid his foes and hamper his enemies. The Defiler is the first addition to the monster side of the equation in the Ettenmoors since launch -- and is certain to alter the PvMP landscape as we continue to expand the War in the Ettenmoors.

Healing

Defilers utilize the fungus and slimes found within the sulfur swamps and dark places throughout Angmar to concoct pastes, dusts, and other disgusting rubs to apply to their allies' wounds. Through years of practice and learning, the Defiler has turned this practice into an art.

The Defiler begins with the ability to perform two initial heals, with the additional effect of healing over time (HoT).

Fertile Slime: "Living slime coats the target's wounds and restores morale." This is a low-power instant-cast HoT with a range of thirty meters and a six-second cooldown that lightly heals the recipient every ten seconds for a period of sixty seconds. It is meant as a bridging heal, to assist the Defiler or a War Leader in keeping a target alive during a light exchange.

Fungal Bloom: "Gourds filled with foul herbs and liquids from the depths of Angmar relieve the sting of wounds on the flesh of foul creatures." This is a low-cost two second cast HoT with a range of thirty meters and a four-second cooldown. It moderately heals the target upon a successful cast, and then restores a moderate amount of health every five seconds for the next thirty seconds.

In addition to these initial healing skills, the early expenditure of a Defiler's destiny points can net him a targeted revival for defeated comrades. Unlike the War Leader this is a costly skill, utilizing morale and power, that only works out-of-combat and targets one monster player.

Rounding out the remaining healing skills for the orc Defiler are the following:

Fell Restoration: "When finished casting Fell Restoration instantly restores a huge amount of morale to target." This is a low-cost three second cast heal with a long ten-second cooldown healing a great deal of health instantly. This becomes available at Rank Three.

Fungal Spores: "Spores weave their way into the target's wounds, stopping bleeding and helping to speed the healing process." This is a medium power cost instant-cast HoT restoring a great deal of health every six seconds for thirty seconds. The cooldown for the skill is low, and it is available at Rank Five.

Cursing

When looking at the monster player classes, we noticed that the majority of the classes had very little in the way of true debuffs with which to hamper the players. To that end, we decided that the Defiler would serve his second role as a debuffer. Utilizing gourds filled with virulent disease and pestilent oozes and slimes the Defiler is able to curse all who oppose him and assist in turning the battle to the monster player's favor.

The Defiler begins with one curse ability:

Curse of the Sticky Feet: "Coats the opponent's feet in a sticky substance that slows their movement speed." This is a low power-cost ability that reduces a target's movement by ten percent for ten seconds. This is an instant cast skill with a moderate cooldown.

As they progress, Defiler's earn new curses to use against the Free People. We outline these below:

Curse of the Lethargic Heart: "A gourd thrown at the target plagues them with spores attacking their heart and weakening their resolve. This skill is only effective against players." This is a medium power cost disease-based curse reducing the target's vitality by a crippling amount for two minutes. It has a two second cast and a long thirty second cooldown and is available at Rank One.

Curse of the Coward's Soul: "Release hallucinogenic spores that strike fear into nearby enemies." This is a medium power cost fear-based curse affecting up to three targets in a six meter radius surrounding the Defiler. This skill is affected by diminishing returns and applies the fear effect to each target for ten seconds. This is an instant-cast skill with a thirty-second cooldown available at Rank Two.
image

Curse of the Deadly Sorrows: "Douse opponent with corrosive liquid that weakens their armour and releases a soporific gas that reduces Will, Fate and Strength." This is a medium-cost poison-based curse reducing the target's fate, will, strength, and armor by a crippling amount. It has a three-second casting time and a thirty-second cooldown and is available at Rank Seven.

Basic Skills

No monster player is complete without the ability to deal some level of damage to their opponents, and the Defiler is no different in this regard. The Defiler begins with one basic damage-dealing skill at the outset and can purchase two others at no rank.

Here are the Defiler's basic skills:

Fire Gourd: "A gourd filled with burning embers is launched at your opponent, setting them alight." This is a medium-cost skill dealing a good deal of initial damage and burning the target for a fair bit of damage every four seconds for the next twenty seconds. It has a range of thirty meters, a casting time of two seconds, and a six-second cooldown.

Plague Gourd: "A plague of flies fills a foetid gourd which explodes on your opponent. On a good throw, the plague flies may cause your opponent to become easier to hit for a short time." This is a medium-cost skill dealing a fair amount of damage, and has a bonus critical effect of lowering the target's avoidance (parry, evade, and block) chances by two percent for twenty seconds. The skill has a two-second casting time and an eight-second cooldown.

Head-crack: "A strong blow from the Defiler's staff. Contact with a Defiler's staff can poison many denizens of Middle-earth." This is a costly melee skill dealing medium damage to a single target with a carrier poison-damage DOT dealing moderate damage over a short period of time. This is an instant-cast skill with a short three-second cooldown.

Follow the Gourd!

Defilers are orcs, and therefore get all the racial abilities inherent to other orcs. In addition, the Defiler can earn enhancing traits to alter and improve their Curse of the Sticky Feet, Plague Gourd, and other skills.

We look forward to seeing the shape of monster play battles change with the addition of the orc Defiler, and know that he will have an impact immediately upon arrival in battles across the Ettenmoors!

Source : lotro.com

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Clan of Conan 15 looks at pre-ordering

2008-04-18T00:22:00.001-07:00

The next Clan of Conan newsletter is finally here, and as promised by Jørgen Tharaldsen in a recent forum post, it goes a long way towards clearing up some Age of Conan pre-order confusion.

First things first, the 3-day early access: the newsletter confirms that this is exclusively for pre-orders, and that your retailer should provide you with an early-access key. However, to actually get that head start, you'll need to take that key to the Funcom website, and pay $5 / €5 (depending on region) to activate it on your account. This was already known by some, but it's important to really get it out there in a fashion like this so that people aren't disappointed later.

As well as this, the dates for access vary around the world. North Americans will be able to download the client early on May 13th, and start playing early from the 17th. For Europeans the early download will be May 16th, and the early access itself starts on the 20th. This is because the North American release date is also 3 days earlier, with the rest of the Europeans joining the head-starters on the 23rd of May.

The other half of the newsletter looks at pre-order bonus items, and the Collector's Edition contents (which we covered a few months ago). Pre-order bonuses will differ depending on which retailer you go with, so do your research to end up with the items you want. Possibilities for in-game items include a War Mammoth with extra inventory bag, a Killer Rhino with the same bag, and an Amazon Curved Bow. Some retailers may offer other extras that are not in-game, like full-color guide booklets. To get a list of pre-order retailer choices, hit the official AoC website, go through to your region's version, and click the pre-order link to see an updated list tailored for your area.

by William Dobson

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Struggling MMO Horizons renamed "Istaria"

2008-04-16T03:22:00.001-07:00

Virtrium LLC, the new stewards of the MMO Horizons: Empire of Istaria, announced that Horizons will now be known by the name Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted.

Virtrium President Rick Simmons explained in a press release blurb and also in an interview with RPG Vault's Jonric that the name was changed because the game is about the world of Istaria and its people, and because it has lived at the domain istaria.com since the beginning. "You have no idea how stupid I've felt explaining that the game was called Horizons, but you had to go to www.istaria.com," he told RPG Vault.

Horizons -- err, Istaria -- has had a rough time of it. After some truly savage corporate politics in the original development studio, the game launched incomplete, buggy, and honestly ... well, lame. It does, however, feature a great crafting system, and it lets you play as a dragon. Simmons was eager to point out both of those things in the RPG Vault interview. It looks like Virtrium is doing as much as a small team can to make the game attractive. Simmons explained: "our niche is very much the crafter, non-competitive gamer, and we're very happy being in it."

He also said that the game has seen a lot of fine tuning in recent months, and that its due for a big content expansion called "the Blighted Labyrinth."

Source : massively.com

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New Mmorpg : Mortal Online

2008-04-15T09:17:00.001-07:00

For the first time ever we at Star Vault are proud to announce the title of our project: Mortal Online!

It is a very exciting day for everyone involved in this project and we have had some stressful but rewarding days prior to this release. We are very pleased to introduce you to the first teaser of Mortal Online as well as our official homepage and our forums. In the forums you will be able to discuss everything regarding the game, and don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter, that way you will stay up to date on the progress of the game!

Each month we will release as much information as we are able to. This information will concern features, screenshots, races and classes and much more. Every so often we will also try to absorb what is said in the forums and what result the surveys display. Some great ideas might even make their way into the game itself!

I hope you are as excited as we are about Mortal Online and that you will follow us through the journey of development!

Henrik Nyström
CEO & Founder
Star Vault

www.mortalonline.com

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Eve Online Client Source Code Leaked

2008-04-15T08:21:00.001-07:00

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that the game client source code for the popular MMO, Eve Online, has been leaked via torrent. In addition to the source code the user also posted a lengthy chat transcript with someone from CCP customer support. While the end goal may have been to call attention to the continuing security issues within Eve (and ultimately themselves), there are probably better ways of getting through to support. Unfortunately, CCP seems to be responding with the usual knee-jerk reaction of banning everyone breathing a whisper of this incident. I wonder if any large MMO company will ever be brave enough to calmly address an issue rather than wielding the ban-hammer.

Source : Slashdot

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World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King FAQ

2008-04-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

Details have slowly been trickling out about the next expansion for World of Warcraft through the official site, game conventions, interviews, and staff comments on the always busy WoW forums. Here's a quick summary of what we know about Wrath of the Lich King so far.

Are there going to be new classes added to the game?

Yes, the Death Knight is going to be the game's first "Hero Class." It will only be available to people that have a character of another class over level 55. Rather than starting at level 1, Death Knights will most likely start between level 55 and 70. Death Knights will not replace existing characters and will be available to both factions. Once unlocked you will be able to create a Death Knight using any open character slots you have on any server.

Death Knights will wear plate and are intended to be a tanking class.

Will the level cap be raised?

Yes, the new level cap will be 80, up from 70 in The Burning Crusade. Talent trees for all classes will be extended, and professions will go up to 450.

What new areas will there be in Wrath of the Lich King?

The new land mass that will be featured in the expansion is Northrend, as Outland was the area added with The Burning Crusade. Like Outland, Northrend is divided into different zones with a variety of terrain. The neutral capital city of Northrend is Dalaran, which will be floating in the sky. The continent will be reachable by either boat or zeppelin.

Northrend will have more than one entry point. The Horde start in the Borean Tundra, where Garrosh Hellscream has established the orc fortress of Warsong Hold. The Alliance begin in the Howling Fjord, which is under threat from the Vrykul, a race of half-giant warriors that once inhabited the area.

It looks like Northrend will be divided into about 10 zones. Some will be lush and green, while others are glacial.

One zone, Lake Wintergrasp, is going to be dedicated to PvP combat, and will be contested even on normal (non-PvP) servers. Blizzard plans to make it a persistent zone with siege weapons and destructible buildings. The siege weapons probably won't belong to individual players, but they will be operated and aimed by players.

What will Northrend have for dungeons and raids?

There will be numerous new 5-player dungeons in the expansion, including a Furbolg encounter called Grizzlemaw, a new Caverns of Time instance, and Utgarde Keep. Utgarde Keep, like Blackrock Spire, will have two wings: the Keep, for characters around level 70, and the Pinnacle, for level 80s. No doubt there are additional 25-player raids, but we haven't heard much about them yet.

There is talk about bringing back some of the older level 60 raids that no longer get much attention in a revamped form. Naxxramas is one instance that could be reinvented for the new level cap as a 25-player raid instead of the 40-player raid it is currently.

Does the expansion have new Battlegrounds?

There is at least one new Battleground in the expansion, but we don't have much information on it at this point. It will likely involve the new player-controlled siege engines, and could be another 15 on 15 contest.

What new professions are planned for Wrath of the Lich King?

The only new profession revealed so far is inscribing. This will be similar to enchanting except that it will apply to spells and abilities rather than items.

What else can we expect from the expansion?

It looks like the interface will get a few more improvements, possibly similar to the Outfitter and Item Rack add-ons. Also in the works are barber shops which will allow players to change the hairstyles and facial hair on their characters at any time.

By : internetgames.about.com

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Age of Conan: Character Select Screen Video

2008-04-13T05:01:00.001-07:00

Age of Conan developers took a video while working on the in-game character select screen. Figuring that it was pretty cool to look at, they have released the video for viewing pleasure.

Here's what they have to say about it:

Every now and then, we rummage around and find some cool stuff on the way, and we just can't resist sharing it.

For example, we were digging around the various arcane folders in our virtual haunted library and stumbled upon a video from some of the developers, obviously captured while they were working on something.

It was a hot new character select screen, one that's never been seen before. Heck, half the development team probably hasn't seen it. We watched it and we thought, well, that's pretty cool. We should give that to people. Then we should leave, before Gaute comes stomping up to demand an explanation for releasing definite Work In Progress-type stuff.

So, here it is, the very latest, cutting-edge, ganked from the developer's desktop, version of the character selection screen. What's interesting is that has a life of its own, like a day-night cycle (it's night in the clip you're seeing), plus wind and all sorts of things. Some of this is still not even ready for beta, much less public viewing, but we're bringing it to you anyway!

We hope you enjoy!

by:Suzie Ford, WarCry Network

Cryptic beaming up Star Trek Online?

2008-04-13T04:55:00.001-07:00

What we heard: Following months of instability, a beleaguered Perpetual Studios officially closed it doors in January, laying off employees and selling off its coveted license to develop a massively multiplayer online game based on sci-fi canon Star Trek. Initial rumblings that came as a precursor to Perpetual's official shuttering indicated that "another Bay Area development studio" would pick up the license to develop an MMOG set in the far-future universe. Although the Bay Area is replete with development houses, eyes quickly turned to Los Gatos-based Cryptic Studios, best known as the developer behind NCsoft's City of Heroes. Evidence continues to mount today that Cryptic will indeed be taking the reins on the Star Trek Online MMOG. Saying it has "independently confirmed with sources," Trekkie hub TrekMovie.com is reporting that the shop is "definitely" the new license holder to develop Star Trek Online. As for why the developer is keeping the project cloaked, TrekMovie states, "Since acquiring the game, Cryptic has been assessing the current state of the game and assets, and deciding what to keep and what to change. Cryptic is holding off on making an announcement because they want to make their announcement more than just words and actually have something to show." Cryptic is certainly positioned to be a likely candidate for salvaging Star Trek Online. After the development house said it would be selling off its interests in City of Heroes/Villains to NCsoft, Cryptic expressly stated that "the decision to sell the franchise allows us to focus resources on our soon to be announced first-party projects." [Emphasis added.] With Microsoft officially pulling the plug on Marvel Universe Online in February, Cryptic's only other announced project is Champions Online. The developer purchased the IP to Champions from pen-and-paper RPG maker Hero Games last month. However, though the developer has expressed interest in developing multiple IPs, much of its resources will be tied up by the task of self-publishing Champions Online. Creating MMOGs in today's market requires an investment of tens of millions of dollars--or $500 million, if Blizzard's World of Warcraft is the target. It seems unlikely that Cryptic, which is a relatively small independent studio, would be able to bankroll more than one MMOG at a time. The official story: Cryptic Studios had not returned requests for comment as of press time. Bogus or not bogus?: Cryptic certainly has the pedigree and experience to handle Star Trek Online, although self-publishing two major MMOGs is a task that even Captain Jean-Luc Picard would find challenging. Either way, with Cryptic keeping mum and no other studios stepping up, Star Trek Online officially remains dead in the water. by gamespot news,( TomM GsCom )

EverQuest II enables social interact

2008-04-12T16:16:00.001-07:00

And then you need to deliver them to 4 different places and come back. For example Shadowfang Keep used to have mobs from level 18 to 26, but now all bosses are level 20 to 21.

The twelve player team is comprised of three teams with four human players each.[18] [edit] Economics See also: Real-money trading A user browsing the market for items in EVE Online A user browsing the market for items in EVE Online Many MMORPGs feature living economies, as virtual items and currency have to be gained through play and have definite value for players. The Nihilum guy has a rather limited opinion of gear: "Players that really want to kill a boss usually have already done so, those that haven t killed it so far are lacking something, usually the problem is a lack of dedication amongst it s raiders and not the gear they have, gear is too easy to be the problem and bosses aren t tuned that well in TBC. Problem with that is that social engineering isn t easy, and if it is overdone it can easily backfire. On the other hand PvP has a huge advantage regarding archetypes in that it is Rumsfeldian: You go to war with the army you have, not the tank / dps / healer mix you d want for a group or raid.[2] During the TGS 2007, Home was announced to be delayed until Spring 2008, though home will still have an earlier "open beta" release. I m talking about the constant whiners that annoy the true gamers like a bug flying in your ear. Would you buy single-player WoW? - posted by Tobold @ 8:35 PM Permanent Link (48) comments Links to this post The flexible solution In the third and last article on how to solve the problem of new players solo rushing through old content to reach the level cap and then not knowing how to group once arrived there, I m going to talk about flexible levels. Save the creativity for expansions.[17] Richard Bartle has classified multiplayer RPG-players into four primary psychological groups. Players are allowed to create characters at maximum level and the best equipment specifically for PvP play, which is unusual for MMORPGs. Most famous is the "staring at an ass in tights all day" argument of Francis from Scott Kurtz s PvPOnline comic.us Buying a Nintendo Wii - Impossible? August 8th, 2007 This is *slightly* off-topic… Recently, I decided to buy a few next generation console systems. mmorpg So this weekend I was having a lot of fun. Most of these games generate revenue by selling in-game "enhancements", and due to their free nature have accumulated huge numbers of registered accounts over the years, with a majority of them from East Asia. Meanwhile, the PLATO computer system, an educational computer system based on mainframe computers with graphical terminals, was pioneering many areas of multiuser computer systems. 2001 also saw MMORPGs move off of PCs and onto home console with the release of Phantasy Star Online[8].[15] Many players report that the emotions they feel while playing an MMORPG are very strong, to the extent that 8. I remember in 2004 some people claimed that WoW was all hype and no substance. The process is also apparently being applied in reverse, with James Cameron designing an MMORPG that will precede a film (Project 880) to which it is tied. Or the guild decided to go to a different raid dungeon than you would have preferred. But in a PvP-based game like WAR one side having an advantage over the other due to the use of addons is more problematic.10 changed those caps to 5 and 10. [edit] Co-operative gameplay A warrior fights a pair of Charr in Ascalon, in the Prophecies campaign. Scrapping their initial plans for a fourth campaign, ArenaNet have released an expansion pack, Guild Wars: Eye of the North, to the previous three campaigns on August 31, 2007. blog Some of these rewards advance not only the particular character but also unlock features of the game account-wide.[citation needed] [edit] Psychology Since the interactions between MMORPG players are real, even if the environments are not, psychologists and sociologists are able to use MMORPGs as tools for academic research. But whether you ask around, or use QuestHelper, or use a quest spoiler site, the result is always the same: exploration stops being part of the quest. EverQuest II enables social interaction with other players through grouping and through the creation of guilds. blog

At some point one side is declared the

2008-04-07T13:18:00.001-07:00

And there are some ruins populated by demons, which used to be a popular place to farm Felcloth. Also traditional in the genre is the eventual demand on players to team up with others in order to progress at the optimal rate. There is a group of shipwrecked people hidden in a canyon on the coast, which you need to protect from a nage attack, but the quest leads nowhere, and few people ever even find it. All player characters have a maximum character level of 20 that is reached fairly early on in the co-operative story. mmorpg In June 2005, SOE introduced Station Exchange to EverQuest II. I thought there is no way the Wii is **that** hard to find considering it has been out for almost a year already. But whether you ask around, or use QuestHelper, or use a quest spoiler site, the result is always the same: exploration stops being part of the quest. For the next few days, we will look at the newest MMORPGs destined to hit the market.[5] Contents [hide] * 1 Common features o 1. Both modes encourage teaming up with other players or AI controlled NPCs known as henchmen. A few of the most successful of these are Silkroad Online by the publisher Joymax, the 3D sprite based MMORPG Flyff by Aeonsoft, Rappelz by NFlavor, , Cronous by Lizard Interactive, the 2D scrolling MMORPG MapleStory by Wizet and finally the free-to-play converted Shadowbane by Ubisoft. Free MMORPG Toplist Don t worry though, my Champion s mis-matched, clown-like (but very effective) armor will still be providing all of the stats. The choice of armor and weapons determine the character s health points. Problem is that this isn t very likely.[4] Although very basic, its use of online avatars (already well established off-line by Ultima and other games) and combining chat and graphics was revolutionary.[7] Still, MMORPGs may offer "RP-only" servers for those who wish to immerse themselves in the game in this way. He correctly points out how little intuitive it is that monsters detect you when you cross an invisible circle, regardless of direction. Why X MMO is better than X MMO Random new generic mmo that is going to be the best thing since oxygen, but never gets released. The object of the game is to score more points than the other team by inserting a rubber ball into a basketball goal. Which is an interesting way to see it. 3 Introduced with Game Update 35. As with other modern 3D games, the front-end requires expertise with implementing 3D engines, real-time shader techniques and physics simulation. But I don t agree that taking away epics rewards from PvP would be the good solution to that. Keep farming Karazhan? Go for Zul Aman or Gruul? Do an all out assault on Serpentshrine Cavern? Or some mix of all of this? Most likely there are people more and less advanced in your guild. It remains a mystery to me how freetraders and other classes are supposed to work together and both have something from it. PvP roles for a warrior tank are even more limited. I haven t uninstalled QuestHelper yet, but I turned off the path with the "/qh ants" command. "But Tay, this topic has been beaten to death as well…" This is true, but most bloggers waste too much time and energy worrying about "the great evil" instead of focusing on the interesting sub-culture and techniques behind the madness. blog The Nihilum guy, being on the top of the food chain, sees that eternal guild drama as a plus, and moans it passing: "I would say that this is the main reason why so many guilds are struggling or disbanding, they simply do not have a reason to exist anymore, and without that, guilds are doomed. free mmorpg blogs Gruul grows and grows, but if the raid group does enough dps, they ll kill him before he grows unmanageable. Everquest and World of Warcraft are two examples of games that use such a format. At some point one side is declared the winner, and the map resets.

Some of these rewards advance not only

2008-04-06T17:01:00.001-07:00

Hydross has two different modes, water and poison, and due to a debuff you can only tank him in one mode for a limited time, and then need to drag him over a line to change his mode. The co-operative parts of Guild Wars use several standard tropes of the MMORPG genre. You d still need to increase the rewards for grouping to make up for waiting in a queue and potentially being grouped with nitwits. "Grand Theft Auto s growth continues to exceed all our expectations," said Leslie Benzies. free mmorpg You can PvP whenever and however you want. You don t need to spend as much time creating an environment and back story since it is already there. And even if PvP epics were better than raiding epics, I d probably end up raiding more than PvPing, just because I personally like cooperative gameplay more than competitive one. Conquering enemy lands in WAR, PotBS, or any other MMORPG can t be permanent. You simply need to go from trying to enforce social ties to trying to promote social ties. We look forward to offering a more invigorating experience for our current fans and welcoming new players into the world this holiday season through our open beta test. I wonder if Azshara will ever get the "Dustwallow Marsh treatment", adding a village or two, a few dozen new quests, and opening up Ursolan and the battleground. Still roguelike, this game became available to consumers in 1984 for $12. rpg As neither level 60 herbs nor cloth are very interesting any more, Azshara is pretty much deserted right now. Unlike most RPGs, Guild Wars has no healing potions; instead, the party s health is managed by a number of healing skills in every class and a few dedicated healing classes. And again I agree with Nihilum and say that cooperative gameplay is the strength of a MMORPG, and should be fostered. Players are allowed to create characters at maximum level and the best equipment specifically for PvP play, which is unusual for MMORPGs. Some of these rewards advance not only the particular character but also unlock features of the game account-wide.

” Also… “In the world outside of t

2008-04-06T06:16:00.001-07:00

From the point of view of the guild member, the same problems appear, only from a different perspective.[28] [edit] Development The cost of developing a competitive commercial MMORPG title often exceeds ten million dollars. And the frequently discussed here option of "easy mode" and heroic raids to the same raid dungeon would also make cooperative gameplay more attractive. * Exchanges of real-world currencies for virtual currencies.[citation needed] More dialog has been added since release as part of regular game updates. If you sell your game for around $50 and take a monthly fee of $13 to $15, you make just over $200 per subscriber per year. I was discussing how to equip my warrior with a reader who sent me a couple of tips by e-mail. The next thing you will be talking about is an adventure where the hero is a plumber trying to save a princess(that lives with toad people) from a giant evil turtle. MMORPG TOPLIST Some GMs may have additional access to features and information related to the game that are not available to other players and roles. "What the hell are you talking about this time Tayman?" It doesn t matter how much I love the game, there is always at least one oxygen bandit (idiot) that annoys the hell out of me. PvP is as popular as never before, and many, many players are in the battlegrounds and arenas for the epics. With over 200,000 test responses as of 2006, this is perhaps the largest ongoing survey of multiplayer game players. Is that good news or bad news? Nobody remembers it any more, but World of Warcraft shipped with a pretty bad UI. Just be careful where you go and who you choose to trust- the world of Eschalon can be a deadly place for an inexperienced adventurer. The object of the game is to score more points than the other team by inserting a rubber ball into a basketball goal. Take-Two s common stock is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the symbol TTWO." Also… "In the world outside of the player house, players can meet and chat with other community-members.

Players who own two or more campaigns m

2008-04-05T20:23:00.000-07:00

You can t just take the first 10 people showing up or do a lottery; you need so and so many tanks, so and so many healers, this or that crowd control, this or that special class for some special encounter, and only when you have filled all those slots there are a few spots remaining for "random" dps classes. Likewise, Warlocks and Wizards (the Sorcerer classes) gained the ability to teleport themselves or their groups to one of three wizard spires. You can suffer this virtual death penalty for minor crimes like sexual harassment or black market activities, which in the real world would be punishable by only a fine.25 million subscribers worldwide, with servers in Japan, China, North America, Taiwan, and Europe, once the popularity of the game had surged in the West. Sony will be creating a more polished version of Second Life with millions of dollars behind the development. Players are allowed to create characters at maximum level and the best equipment specifically for PvP play, which is unusual for MMORPGs. In 1993 at an AIR WARRIOR convention at Houston Texas, Robert "GunJam" Salinas met Dale "Hitech" Addink and saw the communications code and other pieces of code that greatly enhanced and superior to AIR WARRIOR, This new code called Vfilm, HTsim, and the terrain editor, built by Mr Addink. I do believe that if Blizzard made raiding much, much easier, some hardcore raiders would have all the raid dungeons on farm by now and might quit because there was no more challenge left. MMORPG TOPSITES I d say that amnesties don t have to be total. A bit more elaborate to make sure each group has a tank and a healer, but otherwise similar. My frostbolts do over 700 points of damage, nearly 1500 for crits, and as mobs of my level have less than 3000 health, I can kill them with 2 to 4 bolts. The one thing I agree with the author from Nihilum is that World of Warcraft is currently moving away from group play and towards pseudo-solo PvP play. Still, there are a few obvious developments. They rarely ever reach me. Which is an interesting way to see it. play by email I thought there is no way the Wii is **that** hard to find considering it has been out for almost a year already. I blame the Dunbar number. Is the mmo world a boring topic now? Posted in MMORPG, Video Games, games, gaming | No Comments » Bookmark on del. Sony will be creating a more polished version of Second Life with millions of dollars behind the development. Too bad many games don t disclose their subscription numbers any more, especially not when they are going down. MMORPG RANKINGS Players who own two or more campaigns may transport their characters freely from one campaign to the other.

Hundreds of items and dozens of crea

2008-04-05T20:15:00.001-07:00

With many people wanting the job, the game company doesn t have to attach a high salary to it to make it attractive. Premades "farming" random opponents in battlegrounds is just bad game design, because it is minimal fun for the winners and totally frustrating for the losers. MMORPG NEWS It is not that some games don t have good ideas in LFG systems, but somebody needs to go and gather all these good ideas and combine them into one coherent and working system. play by email Girls think of them as home, a place to decorate and have parties with their friends. Casual - I have a busy life that doesn t allow me to play twelve hours a day. Nobody can kick you out of a battleground group. Fortunately I m not interested anyway, UO has aged badly in spite of graphics improvements, still being 2D (with pseudo-3D added on top, EA calls it 2. Five minutes later, I was able to group repetitive tasks into two categories: Sports Watching paint dry In general, most sports are extremely repetitive. The more variety I get access to, the better. About Take-Two Interactive Software Headquartered in New York City, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. By the middle of 1974, there were graphical multiplayer games such as Spasim, a space battle game which could support 32 users, and the Talkomatic multi-user chat system. I don t want to get into fights who should or shouldn t be included in it. And only one click per visitor per day counts. Although EverQuest II focuses on player versus environment (PvE), player versus player (PvP) was added in February, 2006. But otherwise the dungeon loot is okay as it is. Players must purchase an individual campaign in order to access the game elements specific to that campaign; however, all campaigns are linked in one game world. I won t run any permanent advertising for them, but they deserve this one link. - posted by Tobold @ 9:52 AM Permanent Link (14) comments Links to this post Feedback needed on blog layout You might not even have noticed it, but the blog post titles should have changed color, indicating that they are now clickable hyperlinks. Hundreds of items and dozens of creatures await your discovery.

deep space 9 blog a sorozat kedvelőinek

2008-03-08T11:52:00.000-08:00

Sziasztok!

Ez a blog a sorozat szereplőiről, a startrek világról fog szólni, és igényes fun írásokat fog tartalmazni.
Remélem tetszeni fog a magyar rajongóknak!