Bloggers

March 14, 2010

06:59
This is the thread where you can leave your questions and proposals for subjects for me to blog about without having to stay on-topic to anything.Tobold's MMORPG Blog
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers

March 13, 2010

19:51
At TED 2010 Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft demoed live integration of video into the existing structure-from-motion dataset in Photosynth. Though his demo showed a video feed moving around a scene the same data could just as easily be turned around to find the precise position of the camera in real-time. That capability is a key [...]
Source: Joe Ludwig
Categories: Bloggers
08:30
I'm over 3 years late to the party, but I finally bought a "next generation" console, a Playstation 3. My reason for not buying one earlier was that I couldn't think of any "must have" games, and...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
06:17
Karen has been doing a stand up job going to many of the talks for GDC. If you want to read about some of the sessions being done, head over there. She’s already got three articles up there. One other game I want to tell you all about is a game called AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! I remember seeing [...]
Categories: Bloggers
00:08
Saturday afternoon found Potshot and I running around with alts on Lightninghoof. I had Grungur, my healing shaman on and he had his pally on, who was only a couple levels ahead of Grungur, and also spec’d healing. Thinking we might get some good, fast exp, he re-spec’d to protection and we hit the dungeon finder as [...]
Categories: Bloggers

March 12, 2010

22:07
MyTribe is a brand new game that just launched on Facebook, and holy crap it’s gorgeous and fun.  MyTribe is made by Big Fish Games, the makers of Faunasphere.  I’m sharing this here, because it’s complex enough that it feels almost like a “next-gen” Facebook game that even traditional gamers would enjoy. If you’re into “godding” [...]
Source: Cuppycake
Categories: Bloggers
18:41
In the middle of the economic downturn, people from the industry had to make a decision: should we go to GDC? To some, the answer was a clear “no”. GDC has gotten quite small…at least since I started going 2 or 3 years ago. I’m not sure if this trend will continue next year, but [...]
Categories: Bloggers
17:10
It’s the end of random week.  It was a good one with a guest post on managing community expectations, thoughts on MMO biological conditioning, random raid poop and balls, and I even got to sneak in an article on food.  I actually had trouble for the closing post.  Should I do a puzzling haiku?  How [...]
Categories: Bloggers
11:56
As I mentioned in the previous post, Tobold the tauren shaman of Single Abstract Noun is now level 20. What I didn't mention is that he has 851 gold pieces in his pocket, having earned 1,092 gold...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
10:59
So Ferrel wants to bring back the grind and make leveling slower again, while Chris thinks leveling should be slowed down by giving less xp for quests. Both talk about how much better life was in...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
10:01
As I mentioned before, last year I received a special invitation to play Alganon in beta, and to tell the developers my opinion about that game. I told them that they were copying WoW too closely,...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
08:11
I have a confession that I’m a little embarrassed about. Yes, you guessed it, I’ve been playing WOW. I haven’t been spreading that around too much, because of the stigma associated with it. I imagine the next time someone yells at me to “Go back to WOW”, it might actually sting a [...]
Categories: Bloggers
00:17
I got my snark out of the way.  Before I continue, let’s rewind a little bit to the Volume 3, Book 1 Prologue.  The Oath of the Rangers starts off with a journey to Rivendell, where I eventually met with Lord Elrond to discuss a letter sent by Lady Galadriel regarding Aragorn’s need for the [...]
Categories: Bloggers

March 11, 2010

19:40
Here are the slides from my talk at the Social Gaming Summit at GDC 2010. It was a good crowd in a very large room. Gdc 2010: Convergence of Flash Portals and Social GamingView more presentations... [...]
Categories: Bloggers
19:27
Hey all… …currently at the Vivox booth, Brent is on Gamebreakr right now, so go check it out here. I should be on at around 5:30pm-ish PST D out
Categories: Bloggers
18:01
World of Tanks has released the American tank tree for their game. The American tank tree illustrates quite clearly the US position on tank development, which were largely influenced by General McNair, that the US Army didn’t need anything better than the Sherman, which should be used for infantry support and which should leave the enemy [...]
Categories: Bloggers
16:01
(I asked Dan Gray if he would want to touch on the subject of random developer updates.  He was kind enough to oblige, and here is his great contribution to random week. –Ravious) In the age of 140 character communication it’s becoming standard practice for developers to tease their audience with sporadic tidbits of information, be [...]
Categories: Bloggers
15:20
The bulk of a community manager’s job, once the community is set up and running, is expectation management. When you invite people to ask questions, you create an expectation that you’ll answer them all, not cherry pick the easy ones. When you post five times a day, you create the expectation that you will continue [...]
Source: Sanya
Categories: Bloggers
13:00
As I'm not currently raiding, I didn't mention the Icecrown Citadel buff up to now. Blizzard had already in previous expansions made characters stronger and nerfed raid dungeons with time, so that at...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
06:30
Rohan from Blessing of Kings posted a reaction to a proposal that Blizzard should start selling gold to ruin third-party gold sellers, and thinks that this would be okay, if the money went to...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
01:14
A question and a few notes from a closet Trekkie to any others who may be playing this game - * If this is set 30 years after Nemesis, and 22 years after Romulus was destroyed, how is Spock narrating it when he was sent to a parallel universe shortly thereafter? * While the ground fight [...]
Categories: Bloggers
01:07
The network effect is one of those critically important, foundational concepts needed to discuss the success or failure of multiplayer games intelligently, one that gets more “what?” reactions than it should. I’m hoping people know it but perhaps not by that name; knowing it by name lets you tap a century of research and [...]
Categories: Bloggers

March 10, 2010

21:38
Chapter 1 (The protagonist, Me, runs in to the cave and meets with Radanir, the Ranger.) Me: I am so glad I found you.  Aragorn, your leader, has need of you in Rohan.  You must go there at once. Radanir: Of course, Aragorn’s will be done.  However, there’s some orcs in this here cave.  They are too close to the elf outpost. [...]
Categories: Bloggers
16:03
Hail, hail, fire and snow, call the angel, we will go, far away, for to see, friendly angel come to me -Rhyme from the worst episode ever There I was in another strange solar system checking on another Federation outpost. There had been a distress signal.  Something strange was happening on the surface.  There was a request to beam down to [...]
Categories: Bloggers
16:02
As soon as any MMO player hears the word random applied to the MMO genre, as it has been throughout random week, thoughts of the loot pinata spring to mind.  Every time a little dirt weasel falls to the ground a right click tears that sucker open to reveal: a melted candle, a shiny red apple, a [...]
Categories: Bloggers
12:11
Yesterday's discussion on the future Blizzard MMORPG evolved into a discussion of possible changes to MMORPG combat. While various games have fiddled with the system in different ways over the last...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
09:22
Like last year, I’m headed off to GDC. I have my own conference pass this year (no more sleazy pass sharing!), so I’ll be hitting sessions all day Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. For some reason you can’t link directly to your conference schedule, but hey, I have a blog. Post session I’ll fill them in [...]
Categories: Bloggers
07:21
Seriously. Two podcast guest spots and both podcasts run long. Yeah, it's a coincidence.... ;) Anyway, listen to me over at Polygamerous Podcast discuss some of the news of the past week and my thoughts on the industry, how to break in to the industry, etc. http://www.polygamerous.com/2010/03/09/episode-15-poly-of-games-psycho-edition/ Unfortunately, the sound quality on my side isn't all [...]

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

They can’t get me to shut up

Source: Psychochild
Categories: Bloggers
07:10
Back to my 2010 predictions, and one in particular. One of the following companies will announce their first/next project, and it won’t be an MMO (5 points): Aventurine Carbine Studios Red5 Studios Simutronics Turbine Only, when I first made that list, I had 38 Studios on it.  It seemed logical.  I had lumped them together with Red 5 and Carbine last year. Then [...]
Categories: Bloggers
06:30
There was a time when I played the German version of A Tale in the Desert, and Teppy, the main developer, gathered all the players online on the server at one spot to hold a council. He replied to...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers

March 9, 2010

17:00
What to do with all that ISK I have in my wallet? A few weeks back I was sitting in EVE Online.  Star Trek Online was down and I had had all of the WoW I could take for the day.  So there I was in New Eden wondering what to do. I started thinking about one [...]
Categories: Bloggers
15:01
I love food.  For anybody that knows me, I think everything can be analogized to food.  Thankfully Ethic keeps me in check here, for without him this would probably be Kill Ten Rats and Grill.  Well this is random week, and here is my one random topic thinly veiled as a gamer topic.  Gamer food [...]
Categories: Bloggers
08:52
In the open Sunday thread Nils asked "Would you like to speculate on the nature of Blizzards new MMO?". The correct answer to that is "No, I don't like speculating.", but I'm afraid that wouldn't...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
04:13
While it’s safe to say I’m an avid LoTRO player, I’ve found myself at a loss for things to do lately, even after a major patch (which took me under 4 hours to complete all solo/group content). So to keep myself from fatal burnout, I decided to take advantage of the City of Heroes/Villains [...]
Categories: Bloggers

March 8, 2010

21:07
The Flash Games Summit is current going on, which means lots of good juicy info for those who are into casual/social games.  Freetoplay.biz has the full liveblog, but a few of the pros in the casual gaming industry got together to give some tips about what developers should know to make social games. Some of the [...]
Source: Cuppycake
Categories: Bloggers
16:23
Welcome to rand() week at Kill Ten Rats unknowingly sponsored by Leala Turkey of Spouse Aggro fame.  For those sane enough not to have scratched much of the surface of spreadsheet programs or number intensive programming, rand() is a random number generator.  And this week, I will be talking about randomness, choosing random topics, and [...]
Categories: Bloggers
15:29
I began researching netbooks–small laptops aimed mostly at Web browsing–several months ago. I do a fair bit of traveling, and while I love my current machine, lugging the 17″ beast through airports has never been what I would call a treat. Not to mention the fact that a large notebook is completely useless on a [...]
Categories: Bloggers
14:06
Just a heads up that I will be flying off to GDC tomorrow. If you have anything you’d like to see covered, let me know. There will be plenty of video and audio taken…so keep an eye out over at VirginWorlds for coverage. We’ll probably be on Gamebreaker as well…so I’ll let you guys know when [...]
Categories: Bloggers
09:34
In the open Sunday thread a reader asked whether there was any connection between Tamarind founding a new guild for the blogging community and Gevlon founding a new ganking guild. Obviously the two...
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
07:36
After having my host switch me to a new server, seems I'm back online. Hooray! Just in time for the GDC, at least. Post copyright Brian 'Psychochild' Green. Visit the post to participate in the comments: Back online!

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

Back online!

Source: Psychochild
Categories: Bloggers
06:35
I asked my daughter a few weeks back whether I should work on saving up cash for one of the mammoth mounts that can carry two passengers or if I should concentrate instead on the Mekgineer’s Chopper, an engineer created motorcycle mount that can carry one passenger. My daughter immediately said, “The motorcycle!” As a father, I [...]
Categories: Bloggers
00:51
Recently, I have been made the Facebook Games Examiner for the national edition of the Examiner.  I’m basically just relaying the news in various Facebook games.  If you have any interest in Facebook game news, please subscribe to my RSS feed over there and click and comment on some articles.   I figure once a week I’ll [...]
Source: Cuppycake
Categories: Bloggers

March 7, 2010

20:28
The contest has come to life, we now have one entry!  Sometimes a little bit of whining works. The entry has been validated, accepted and has a good chance of winning even if somebody else enters.  I don’t want to give it away, but I’ll put out this hint. As good as this entry is though, it [...]
Categories: Bloggers
19:28
The contest update is that there is no contest update, really. There is no update really because nobody has entered yet.  So there is NO competition currently to win a code for a WoW in-game pet. And if there is only one entry, they will get the pet even if it is a variation on Leeroy with [...]
Categories: Bloggers
10:05
I’ve decided that my current mission in World of Warcraft needs to be to get the Loremaster achievement.  This is guaranteed to be difficult and tedious, but I think it will be fun.  I’m such a lore buff in WoW, so this is the perfect title for me.  I contemplated leveling an alt, but there [...]
Source: Cuppycake
Categories: Bloggers
07:07
Are there any questions you have for me? Or do you have suggestions for subjects you want me to write about during the week?Tobold's MMORPG Blog
Source: Tobold
Categories: Bloggers
06:29
A friend of mine has dolls that she treats as children. They each have personalities, wardrobes, adventures, etc. She posts about them on the assorted social networking sites. I sometimes find this odd until I remind myself that we are doing the exact same thing, probably for more hours per day, only [...]
Categories: Bloggers

March 6, 2010

21:49
… you gotta learn to play it right. Major props to the guys who did that masterpiece.
Categories: Bloggers
19:18
Tami Baribeau: Woohoo! Island Life just passed 200,000 monthly active users!!! YIPPIE! http://bit.ly/aQaE1E Considering that Island Life has been available for about 1 and a half months, that's pretty much a catch-all. How about releasing weekly numbers? Raph Koster: The...
Categories: Bloggers
06:23
GDC has come once again. I'll be in San Francisco and would be happy to meet up with anyone. Just drop me an email at danc [at] lostgarden.com. This year I'll be giving two talks, both during the... [...]
Categories: Bloggers