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Canthan New Year has introduced me to one of the weirdest pieces of game design I have ever seen. You can buy tickets for minigames on the boardwalk. There are three games, and there is no other use for tickets. One of the games is an unexciting whack-a-mole, and it costs 1 ticket to play [...]

[GW] Tickets is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

In the 2001 census in Britain, "Jedi" was the 4th largest religion. Even if probably most of them were just making fun of the government the specific choice of "Jedi" over some other fictional...

There is a war going on somewhere. I know this because it has been broadcast via corporation mail. We have been told to knock off all that carebear crap, get out there and stick it to the enemy. So don’t rat, don’t mine, and stay the hell out of empire space because some other alliance [...]

It’s official: per CFO Eric Brown, during an earnings conference call, SWTOR is making a lot of money, with 1.7m subscribers (which Brown went to an unusual effort to quantify correctly as a mix of paying customers and customers with … Continue reading →

Trion dropped a big patch in Rift earlier this week, and like all such patches, not everything went as planned.  So we have the first post-patch hotfix already that addresses a list of issues. Among the fixes were a few directed at the new wedding and marriage system. WEDDINGS * Wedding Rings now get converted [...]

Combat is an important part of many different games, including role-playing games. While games without combat are possible, see for example A Tale in the Desert, they are few and far between....

It was pretty exciting to realize that you are not limited to human henchmen. You can pick up a Tengu or even a couple of rot wallows. I don’t know why I’d take them over my heroes, but they seem like a decorative touch for players in hero-less campaigns. It was disappointing to see that [...]

[GW] Henchling Variety is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The word "amateur" has French (and ultimately Latin) roots, literally meaning "lover of". It describes somebody who does an activity out of love for it, not because he is getting paid for it. While...

Just a short note, but longtime friend of Kill Ten Rats, Rubi Bayerm headmistress of Massively, has headed off to ArenaNet! We here at our humble blog are extremely proud of Rubi, and I can honestly think of no one else in the community better suited for heading to the excellent ArenaNet team. Martin Kerstein, [...]

Rubi Heading To Higher Ground is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Earl lives on the east coast.   So for our Saturday night groups, he starts playing a midnight while for the rest of us, who are all in California, the time is just 9pm.  And to his credit, it is usually we in the Pacific time zone who poop out first. Iron man though he [...]

Jason Wall sent me a note explaining that World of Warcraft (you've heard of it?) is doing even more to encourage the formation of ad hoc raiding groups. Back in the day, he notes, the only way you could get raid-level gear was by being in a raid-level guild and by raiding, a lot. Much was said back then (not least by me) about the way MMORPGs seemed to provide a communal experience for people isolated by contemporary society. If society gave people anomie, then online community, it seemed, was the antidote. How pollyannish! We (I) also said that online...

In yesterday's investor's earnings call, Electronic Arts said they sold over 2 million copies of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and had 1.7 million subscribers. I'm not quite sure at what moment in...

The Luxon are a nomadic people in Guild Wars who use giant turtles. When I first saw one, I immediately wanted to tame it as a pet. Then I noticed that it was being used as a beast of burden. And Dungeon Siege thought it was so fancy with its pack mules. Guild Wars 2 [...]

[GW] Turtle Power is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Much has been discussed on this blog on the relative advantages and disadvantages of linear games versus open world games. Skyrim was widely hailed as a great open world game, but it also serves as...

Captain Quimang is really not welcome in that village. : Zubon [GW] Scunthorpe Problem is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

[GW] Scunthorpe Problem is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

It isn’t like Trion has been secretive about the game in whose market space they are playing.  World of Warcraft is clearly their target, the source of much of their player base (a million customers at one point, by their accounting), and the model they feel they have to keep abreast of, if not ahead [...]

The Dutch Supreme Court issued its ruling in the Runescape theft case today. You can find the ruling here, and here's a Google-translated version. The ruling cites to the work of Professor Arno Lodder (who guest-blogged here), who has been keeping close tabs on the case, as well as to my book and to my work with Dan on virtual law & virtual crime. One thing to bear in mind is that this case involved real violence and the theft of virtual goods. The victim was beaten and threatened with a (real) knife, with the defendants demanding he hand over...

Today Rock, Paper, Shotgun as an article on ownership of games, especially on the Steam platform. It’s a good one for anybody holding a virtual library of games on the many available platforms. The simple fact is that we [probably] do not own our games. There’s a lot of uncertainty as discussed by a lawyer [...]

Virtual Property Lines in the Sand is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The original Everquest goes free-to-play. Somehow I'm not sure that is going to be a big success. But then, I might actually try it again sometime, just for laughs and nostalgia.Tobold's MMORPG Blog

Syp has a picture of the day a photo of him holding up a Star Trek Online Collector's Edition he bought for $6.50. Which had my fullest understanding, I bought a collector's edition of Final Fantasy...

The scroll had an inscription, “Measure for Measure,” making it highly salvageable. I extracted 7 Planks of Wood from the paper. That is some highly salvageable paper. : Zubon [GW] Blood From a Stone is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

[GW] Blood From a Stone is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I am currently preparing my first Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition adventure, after having taken a break of over 15 years from dungeon mastering. I'd love to share, but as my players can read the...

The Site After five years, I updated the About page for the blog. The primary improvements, a relative term on the best of days, were removing my picture and rewriting the whole thing up as something mildly resembling a FAQ, despite the fact that none of the questions listed have ever been asked with any [...]

The Site After five years, I updated the About page for the blog. The primary improvements, a relative term on the best of days, were removing my picture and rewriting the whole thing up as something mildly resembling a FAQ, despite the fact that none of the questions listed have ever been asked with any [...]

I have always been interested in writing. So as a teenager in the early 80's I owned a piece of state of the art word processing technology: An electric typewriter. And I even went to a typing...

So go ahead and watch this: Now, go ahead and work through your rage.  I implore you, resist the urge to track this guy down and stab him.  I know he SEEMS evil, but he’s actually totally spot-on – and not JUST about Zynga and “social” games. A Simple Fact About Games: If you’ve played [...]

The opposite of Pixel Click Bosses appears in games that are too eager to give the player data. They want the indication to be clear and highly visible. Unfortunately, the game is still going on underneath those indicators. The game is not hiding the new factors by using too few pixels; it is hiding the [...]

Obfuscation is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I already ran down the quick history of LEGO Universe back in November. That was when they announced that the game would be shutting down.   And the date of the shut down has come and gone.  The game joins an ever growing list of MMOs that have seen their last day. Actually, their original press [...]

I already ran down the quick history of LEGO Universe back in November. That was when they announced that the game would be shutting down.   And the date of the shut down has come and gone.  The game joins an ever growing list of MMOs that have seen their last day. Actually, their original press [...]

Just to save this for future reference, this is the EverQuest free to play subscription chart. As with EverQuest II there are three levels, free, silver, and gold, with restrictions that sound largely the same.  There is a limit on which races or classes you can access without paying. There is one interesting twist in [...]

Just to save this for future reference, this is the EverQuest free to play subscription chart. As with EverQuest II there are three levels, free, silver, and gold, with restrictions that sound largely the same.  There is a limit on which races or classes you can access without paying. There is one interesting twist in [...]

Everquest 1 going free-to-play. With the announcement, the frozen-in-amber separate EQMac server is also going away, which disappointed the people who preferred EQ frozen in amber.    

Hidden away in the EverQuest free to play FAQ is a mention of the EverQuest Al’Kabor server. (Question 16, since I cannot link to it directly.) Al’Kabor is the server that supports the Macintosh version of EverQuest, and may be the only true old shool version of the game available. (Today’s theme is SOE and [...]

Hidden away in the EverQuest free to play FAQ is a mention of the EverQuest Al’Kabor server. (Question 16, since I cannot link to it directly.) Al’Kabor is the server that supports the Macintosh version of EverQuest, and may be the only true old shool version of the game available. (Today’s theme is SOE and [...]

This just in from the EQ Players site, we have a further answer to my question about what other SOE titles will go free to play. Hello everyone – I hope you all are doing well early on in the New Year! With an exciting Veil of Alaris expansion just released in November, we’re thrilled [...]

This just in from the EQ Players site, we have a further answer to my question about what other SOE titles will go free to play. Hello everyone – I hope you all are doing well early on in the New Year! With an exciting Veil of Alaris expansion just released in November, we’re thrilled [...]

If all the people who wish there was an MMO like MMOs used to be would stop wringing their hands and go play Vanguard, maybe it would get that expansion. Even without one, it remains very close to the best MMO there’s ever been. Bhagpuss, in a comment at We Fly Spitfires Oh Vanguard, saga [...]

If all the people who wish there was an MMO like MMOs used to be would stop wringing their hands and go play Vanguard, maybe it would get that expansion. Even without one, it remains very close to the best MMO there’s ever been. Bhagpuss, in a comment at We Fly Spitfires Oh Vanguard, saga [...]

A quarter of a century ago I still produced campaign maps for Dungeons & Dragons by hand, using hex paper and colored crayons. Now that I am preparing a new campaign, I realized that I had better...

One of the major themes of this blog is how people react to incentives. Unfortunately the disadvantage of observing how this works in games is that you realize how much of that is going on in real...

The Guild Wars death penalty is wiped when you head back to town, so there are no permanent setbacks. At worst, you can fail to gain. You will usually come out at least marginally ahead: a little gold in your pocket and experience toward a skill point. After an evening of utter failure, you still [...]

Forward Progress is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Pokemon.com has been teasing visitors for over a week now with an upcoming download event for Pokemon Black and White players.  The Pokemon being dangled before us is the rare Mewtwo. Pokemon who get their own entry in Wikipedia are pretty rare, there being 646 Pokemon available at this point, so Mewtwo is pretty important [...]

Pokemon.com has been teasing visitors for over a week now with an upcoming download event for Pokemon Black and White players.  The Pokemon being dangled before us is the rare Mewtwo. Pokemon who get their own entry in Wikipedia are pretty rare, there being 646 Pokemon available at this point, so Mewtwo is pretty important [...]

Sometimes you need to stand up for yourself, or you're just begging to be taken advantage of. We (Spry Fox) have filed a copyright infringement suit in federal court against 6Waves LOLAPPS in... [...]

Diablo 3 is going to have an auction house in which players can sell virtual items to other players for real money. Which prompted some people to start dreaming of getting rich by playing video...

I've spent like 10 minutes yesterday playing Star Wars: The Old Republic before I got bored, and watched video reviews of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons on YouTube instead. And read some written...

This could just be the completist or Achiever in me talking, but players do not like to be told that they missed something and must start over if they want it. We MMO players are usually content that there are cosmetics available as one-time event rewards or such, but if something has gameplay value or [...]

Closed Doors is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I am pretty much done working on the my Guild Wars Hall of Monuments. I am at 35 points, and while I would love 40, I just don’t have the will to grind those last few. Recently, I’ve been going through archives of this and interviews of that. I had the sad task of cleaning out my [...]

[GW2] Unicorn Costumes is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

While googling for Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, I discovered there is a "Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition for Dummies" book out there. I found that extremely weird. I know that there are "for...

Flipping to the Factions campaign with a Nightfall character, it feels like some important story elements were left out. No no, don’t tell me, I can work it out from inference and wiki, but again pretending that you had not already run through Factions, imagine the new player. There is a plague in Cantha. That [...]

[GW] In Medias Res? is a post from: Kill Ten Rats