Bloggers

February 9, 2010

07:02
I like The Onion, but I rarely find myself reading much of it because the full text rarely improves on the headlines. You might need to read the first paragraph to see where they are taking the joke, but stringing it out for 1000 words does not add much to the first 5 seconds. [...]
Categories: Bloggers

February 8, 2010

09:08
Wolfshead is worried that the immersion of World of Warcraft is eroding. Apparently he used to be immersed in WoW, and now, thanks to additions like Mr. T and the Dungeon Finder, he is not any more....
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
07:11
Several of the questions in yesterday's open Sunday thread were too short to write a long essay on, so I'm grouping the questions and my answers to them here: What do you think the prospects are on...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
06:49
The recent layoffs at Red 5 Studios lead me to think about the often convoluted history of subscription-based MMO development studios in America and Europe. How many MMOs did EA release and then kill? How did other studios consisting of Ex-Blizzard developers fare? Where did BioWare Austin come from? What’s up with European MMO studios? [...]
Categories: Bloggers
03:00
I played Mario Kart Wii today, and I spent more time kvetching about level design than actually playing. I like games that are not afraid to be cute in the North American market, but too many take the “it’s a kids game” excuse to skimp on things like balance or reasonable level design. [...]
Categories: Bloggers

February 7, 2010

07:02
This thread is for you to ask questions or suggest themes for future blog posts.Tobold's MMORPG Blog
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
04:01
Here's a rough sneak peak video of an indie gem called SteamBirds. As I was playing, I started thinking about questions of authorship and authenticity in the game industry. The game Steambirds... [...]
Categories: Bloggers

February 6, 2010

09:29
I just started playing Allods Online, which by an extreme stretch of semantics is still in closed beta, but that closed beta is now open to everyone. And I wonder: How it is that Allods Online, a...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
01:07
01:07
00:46
I’ve been playing a lot of Facebook games lately, almost solely in fact (with the exception of Dragon Age, which I am still plugging away at).  If I ran down them all, it would take forever – so I’ll keep this one to an island theme only Island Life is one I might be [...]

Facebook Games – Islands Edition! is a post from: Cuppytalk

Source: Cuppycake
Categories: Bloggers
00:03
Pokemon Diamond first showed up about two years ago. It came with my daughter’s Nintendo DS Lite back on St. Valentine’s Day of 2008, all of which was part of the plan to keep her busy on the plane for our trip to Maui that year. And it was a huge hit.  Big enough that I ended [...]
Categories: Bloggers

February 5, 2010

15:45
Looks like a new Expo will be held in Minneapolis later this year for MMO Fans. I plan to be there. Here are some of the details of the Looking For Group Expo: June 25 – 27, 2010 Minneapolis, Minnesota LFGX is a three-day exhibition for massively multiplayer online games, virtual worlds, tabletop, RPG card games and comics. LFGX [...]
Categories: Bloggers
14:57
I got to stop talking about STO before I get labeled as a “fanboi” or something. But I refuse to remove the star trek theme from playing in my head. A bit of Eve Online news to talk about. Ahhhh yes….Eve Online. I’ve stopped playing that for a bit, which is typical of me…but I will [...]
Categories: Bloggers
13:58
The ArenaNet community managers are using an interesting tactic over at the Guild Wars 2 unofficial forum where they take the gist of a thread and quickly interview the devs themselves.  I really like that they are opening up a tad more communication, but the quick hits can get lost in the middle of a [...]
Categories: Bloggers
13:38
This is just to tell you that I updated my Terms of Service, after re-reading them and finding some points that were outdated. In particular the changes were: - Added a remark to paragraph 4 to...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
08:43
MMO Champion reports that the 25 Ensidia members who participated in the "first" 25-man Lich King kill have been banned for 72 hours. Quote: Date of Violation: 03/02/2010 Type of violation:...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
07:02
“You are less punctual than desired!” “I don’t think your socks match, although it is difficult to tell from here!” “YOUR MOM has excellent penmanship!” : Zubon
Categories: Bloggers
06:45
A lot of blogs are talking about Star Trek Online’s successes and failures. Atari announced today that STO had over one million accounts activated. The blogs like MMORPG.com, gamerant, and even us at killtenrats have noticed. However, we’ve also noticed that we’ve heard this story before. We heard it from Age [...]
Categories: Bloggers
06:30
mbp had a very good question in the open Sunday thread, asking "Can nice people role play villains in a hardcore game like EVE or Darkfall where villains really do upset their victims or do you need...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
05:03
Perhaps the biggest change to come in Lord of the Rings Online Volume 3, Book 1 update will be that skirmishes can now be done with a 2-person party. It was the podcast by Casual Stroll to Mordor where the devs talk about the “need” for this and how they went about it. (I also [...]
Categories: Bloggers
00:53
But not to get married. No, not everything I’ve done over the last week has involved outer space.  There was still time spent in Azeroth. It was time to wrap up the Scarlet Monastery by hitting the cathedral and defeating High Inquisitor Whitemane. As usual, I went and positioned myself at the summoning stone out of habit.  Tonight [...]
Categories: Bloggers

February 4, 2010

22:08
I have been working on a project for some time.  It had its flits and spurts, and it is finally live over at Massively!  Thanks especially to Shawn Schuster who I approached with the idea.  He helped a lot; especially to whip some answers out of the elusive answerers.  I hope that if you run [...]
Categories: Bloggers
20:41
MassiveBlips is part of a network of “Blips” sites, including one dedicated to World of Warcraft called WoWBlips. And, like all of the “Blips” site, they try to quantify things, ranking stories and sites for popularity. Of course, these rankings are all automated and are somewhat dubious in many ways.  But the outstanding example of this has [...]
Categories: Bloggers
20:25
Dear Bell Canada, I don’t give a flying fuck or a rolling donut about the “100 free minutes” you just gave me via a text message. I don’t even use 10 minutes over a month, so wtf do I need 100 for? Here’s an idea….how about not raping me in the ass for data? Sincerely, A Customer who really [...]
Categories: Bloggers
16:40
Well…I can’t seem to stop talking about STO. It really has grabbed me quite a bit, hasn’t it. Last night, I hit Lt. Cmdr which gives you access to the tier 2 ships. Now, I had bit of a decision to make as to which class of ship to go with…either a cruiser or an escort. [...]
Categories: Bloggers
16:32
I got through Volume 2, Book 9 pretty quickly in Lord of the Rings Online Siege of Mirkwood.  Getting through the epic books is one of my favorite goals to set, and when a new Book drops, it is one of the first I usually attack.  Book 9 used the new gameplay type Skirmishes instead [...]
Categories: Bloggers
16:22
I’ve meant to do a quick post on this cool thing called the Azeroth Advisor for a while now. When I first tried it my main characters were level 80 and its value was somewhat dubious.  But then we re-rolled horde and its guide to where to adventure and annotated maps became useful. But this morning I [...]
Categories: Bloggers
16:01
Barely two months in and I have found a winner.  From the great podcast/site A Casual Stroll to Mordor in their latest podcast with Lord of the Rings Online Skirmish devs, getting hit by environmental effects or geometrical boss effects in MMOs that devs love to use shall now be called: Standing in the Poop. The saying is [...]
Categories: Bloggers
10:36
There is some excitement on the WoW blogosphere about an announcement of Blizzard that they would introduce web access via browser or iPhone to the World of Warcraft auction house. Some people...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
08:57
A long time ago I did play the original King's Bounty from 1990. The game then evolved into the Heroes of Might & Magic series, but with some noteable changes: In King's Bounty you just had one hero...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
06:27
Truer words have never been spoken. “I’m going to go out on a limb here, and assert that setting a realistic scope is one of the most difficult challenges an MMO producer will face.” Lum understates his point. He shouldn’t. Scope is a balancing act. When making an MMO that seeks to evolve the genre in some way [...]
Categories: Bloggers

February 3, 2010

18:52
Despite the Star Trek line about boldly going where no on has gone before (which is right there on the back of the box), we’re now talking about an MMO and so anything I do will be more like boldly going where many, many people have gone before. Which isn’t always a bad thing. For example, I [...]
Categories: Bloggers
09:19
In an age where everybody defends "his" MMORPG with religious fervor, I am still an agnostic. That is to say I don't believe there is any perfect MMORPG, and see good and bad sides in each of them....
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
09:01
Mrs. P and I ordered the Collector’s Edition of Star Trek Online.  The only CE I’ve ever ordered before was the WoW Wrath of the Lich King CE for Mrs.  (primarily because of the Frosty Pet).  She likes the pets, what can I say.  For those of you who don’t have the great good fortune [...]
Source: Potshot
Categories: Bloggers
07:20
I'm not really happy about patch 3.3.2 of World of Warcraft, because the patch notes start with a long list of encounters in heroic dungeons that have been shortened. Bosses use special abilities...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
07:02
That MMO break has been working out so well, it merits an extension. This is a good time for it anyway; the only interesting MMO release announced for this year is Cataclysm (I already beat WoW, done), and last year’s only sign of promise was Fallen Earth. This is a point in the [...]
Categories: Bloggers
03:51
All codes activated.  Nerdiness set to warp factor 11. Now to see what else got turned on in-game.  Make it so!
Categories: Bloggers

February 2, 2010

16:11
Last weekend I dug away at a repeatable quest for Guild Wars Wintersday Redux, which ends this weekend with a finale for those having hat problems during Wintersday 2009.  The quest is a fun one called Snowball Dominance, where the denizens of the Eye of the North go outside for a massive snowball fight.  Players [...]
Categories: Bloggers
12:34
I was recently talking with someone and the topic of cultural differences in gaming came up. Games made in one culture sometimes doesn't seem to translate very well into other cultures. The example familiar to most MMO players is how Asian free-to-play MMOs don't seem to translate over to the U.S. very well for a lot of reasons. I ask more questions than give answers, but let's look a bit at how cultural issues come into play in games.

Post copyright Brian 'Psychochild' Green. Visit the post to participate in the comments:

Cultural differences in gaming

Source: Psychochild
Categories: Bloggers
08:29
Until recently my wife was playing World of Warcraft on an old 17" 4:3 flatscreen monitor, while I had changed to a 22" 16:9 screen a year ago. Having seen how much nicer it is to play on a broader...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
07:31
Ok, so I’ve been hedging a bit.  STO has had two offers pending for subscriptions prior to the live launch.  The lifetime offer and the 12 month-what-adeal, offer.  Wil at TAGN has decided to throw down. I was about to this weekend, but decided to hedge.   See, Mrs. P had not played quite so much as [...]
Source: Potshot
Categories: Bloggers
07:02
What I think of as my “home server” in Team Fortress 2 runs just one map (2fort) with increased teams (16 per side) and a long running time (up to 3 hours). I found this very helpful for learning the game, as I did not need to simultaneously learn a couple dozen maps (including [...]
Categories: Bloggers
02:14
And I spent most of that head start not being able to log into Star Trek Online for various reasons, not always the fault of the game. Sure, at one point I spent long time looking at this message. Then there was the case of the message in the launcher explaining that the server was down when [...]
Categories: Bloggers

February 1, 2010

23:54
This is just amazing: The “Founders’ Dilemmas” course at Harvard Business School hosts a high-wattage visitor tomorrow: retired Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, who’ll be talking about his videogame start-up, 38 Studios. Founders’ Dilemmas, taught by Noam Wasserman, focuses on “the tough, early choices that founders face that have important, long-term implications for them and their ventures.” [...]
Categories: Bloggers
20:57
Let’s start with STO. To sum it up, it was a bit of a mess over the weekend. The main idea behind a head start is for players to actually play to get ahead of the pack by a couple levels. This is kind of hard to do if the servers are going down constantly. [...]
Categories: Bloggers
17:39
His style is usually a bit more… coherent. When you receive this message at the same time means that you have a routine account of our recent examination, was checking your account we have the evidence to prove that involved in the controversial game currency transaction so we had to take the necessary measures. Please visit our [...]
Categories: Bloggers
15:26
Hello, my name is Ravious, and I am a persistence addict.  I try and play other games.  The one’s sitting solely on my hard drive.  The ones with no boundaries.  They are great games that I ignore.  But, to me, they are meaningless trifles when I can etch my accomplishments into a monolithic server farm [...]
Categories: Bloggers
09:14
Still two days until live release and only six gold energy credit spam emails in my Star Trek Online mailbox… Hell, I only found my mailbox today after closed beta and open beta… Considering the downtime during headstart weekend, how could anyone even GET 100k energy credits to sell? I guess the credit crunch is over… (Note the [...]
Source: Potshot
Categories: Bloggers
07:02
Anyone have screenshots that measure up to real life? I know we are just primates who react with “ooh, ah” sounds to fire and shiny objects, but damned if the Vikings don’t still have us all beat for awesome. (Carl De Souza with the winning images.) While some commenters there are down on [...]
Categories: Bloggers