Bloggers
July 3, 2009
18:15
Darren has gone back to give Runes of Magic another try and seems to be more disposed to like it than he was the first time around.
But then he hit a snag. He started looking at the Real Money Transaction, or RMT, aspect of the game and did not like what he saw.
Specifically, he saw [...]
Source: Ancient Gaming Noob
Categories: Bloggers
17:21
While it will not become final until filed next week, Lori Drew’s conviction has been dismissed. This is important to gamers and other online folk, because the government’s theory in the case was that any violation of Terms of Service should be viewed as the same offense as hacking (”unauthorized access”), and therefore a [...]
Source: KillTenRats - Ethic
Categories: Bloggers
13:18
A little clarification on this horse bullshit that I’m seeing in RoM.
So…here we go again on the question of value for our money and I must say that I’m disappointed so far with the comments on that posting of mine below. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me…far from it. What I really didn’t [...]
Source: Common Sense Gamer (Darren)
Categories: Bloggers
07:40
Apparently, Candyland, Battleship, and Asteroids were optioned for movies. To my surprise, everyone focuses on Asteroids. “How can they make a movie of that??” People keep saying this but they’re wrong!
A motley crowd of ethnically diverse people thrown together by circumstance are traveling in a hermetically sealed spaceship with an incredibly valuable cargo. Inside it [...]
Source: Raph's Koster Website
Categories: Bloggers
05:30
01:47
Dara Roesner’s Wordpress plugin for embedding Metaplace worlds is now up on Wordpress.org. So you can grab it there, or you can go to your Dashboard, click Plugins, click Add New, and search for “metaplace.” There will be two results, actually, because SignpostMarv’s MetaverseID plugin also supports Metaplace.
In any case, from there you [...]
Source: Raph's Koster Website
Categories: Bloggers
01:11
…are you out of your fuckin mind?!?!
Here’s the deal….and I’m absolutely disgusted by this. A “permanent” horse in Runes of Magic, it is 199 diamonds…let’s call it 200 cause that’s what it really should be (…seriously guys…time to start rounding things up…). 200 diamonds cost $10.94 Canadian.
Are you seriously telling me, with a straight face, [...]
Source: Common Sense Gamer (Darren)
Categories: Bloggers
01:06
This is fantastic, and was exactly the kind of project I wanted to start up with the free time that I don’t have. GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) is a great organization that seeks to increase positive awareness of LGBT issues in the media. I’ve been thinking about the need to have something [...]
Source: Cuppycake
Categories: Bloggers
July 2, 2009
23:45
21:16
19:23
Game Design Essentials: 20 RPGs on Gamasutra is an excellent and in-depth look at RPGs.
I do miss at least some mention of MUD or DikuMUD, rather than jumping direct to World of Warcraft as the sole exemplar there; almost all MMORPGs today draw from those roots. And there’s also a curious lack of mention of [...]
Source: Raph's Koster Website
Categories: Bloggers
19:13
Very interesting pieces about Warhammer out there right now…all with the same theme.
First up is Massively:
Like I said before, Mythic screwed up royally in implementation. By broadening their appeal to too many people they diluted the quality of their feature set and in the process made some really odd design decisions (e.g., Let’s ramp up [...]
Source: Common Sense Gamer (Darren)
Categories: Bloggers
18:01
The whimper at the end of an era.
CompuServe, the corporate entity, dates to 1969 but the CompuServe Classic online service for consumers debuted in 1979. In 1987 it was the flagship of online services with 380,000 users. A 1991 TV commercial trumpets CompuServe as the only online service with more than a half-million [...]
Source: Raph's Koster Website
Categories: Bloggers
16:05
Saturday night and we were all in Dalaran making our way to Violet Hold.
Actually, only four of us were in Dalaran. I was waiting somewhere else. WoW still crashes on my machine when ever I get too close to Dalaran despite having installed a variety of drivers, swapped video cards, shut down every extraneous system [...]
Source: Ancient Gaming Noob
Categories: Bloggers
13:37
I played a large amount Wizard 101, which was recently updated with the Grizzleheim update. Not only is there a new region, which branches the usual leveling path, but there are a whole slew of core mechanics that were just added.
The first, and in my opinion biggest, core improvement is the Bazaar. The Bazaar acts as [...]
Source: KillTenRats - Ethic
Categories: Bloggers
10:54
08:31
Gordon over at We Fly Spitfires wrote an interesting article about The Philosophy of Friendship. (http://blog.weflyspitfires.com/2009/06/29/the-philosophy-of-friendship/) He takes a look at what friendship in the online world means. The comments are equally insightful, too. Gordon then followed up with a post about Consequences in Virtual Worlds (http://blog.weflyspitfires.com/2009/06/30/consequences-in-virtual-worlds/) where he expands on the idea of how separate "reality" and the actions in "virtual worlds" really are.
Instead of writing an epic-length comment there, I figured I'd write blog post.
Post copyright Brian 'Psychochild' Green. Visit the post to participate in the comments:
Source: Psychochild
Categories: Bloggers
08:16
06:02
Upgrade Complete just needs an RMT shop to finish it out.
: Zubon
Source: KillTenRats - Ethic
Categories: Bloggers
01:30
I posted awhile back about what a cool idea player-created books are in EQ2. Courtesy of @brenlo on Twitter, I’ve now become aware of something great that a player on the Najena server made. “The Mystery of Greely Manor” is a hidden object adventure that leads you from book to book to solve a mystery. [...]
Source: Cuppycake
Categories: Bloggers
01:12
Jonathan Kinkley, who has just completed his Masters Thesis in Art History at University of Illinois at Chicago, ask if we could share his research. We're always happy to link to new work on virtual worlds. The full paper is...
Categories: Bloggers
00:10
The PlaynoEvil blog has the best summary i have seen of the key issues — and they still have wideranging implications!
- If the service is shut off, customers are entitled to a refund of unused currency.
- “virtual currency should be exchanged only for virtual goods and services provided by the issuer of the currency” (this [...]
Source: Raph's Koster Website
Categories: Bloggers
July 1, 2009
23:19
Learn Starcraft From A REAL KOREAN!
My lessons are offered to only non-Koreans or American born Koreans because they lack the blessing from the Gaming God, Norazi. Sun Tzu once said, “Defiler becomes useless at the presences of a vessel.” You will be come the vessel against the defilers that treats you like a non-korean, laughing [...]
Source: BrokenToys - Lum
Categories: Bloggers
23:19
Learn Starcraft From A REAL KOREAN!
My lessons are offered to only non-Koreans or American born Koreans because they lack the blessing from the Gaming God, Norazi. Sun Tzu once said, “Defiler becomes useless at the presences of a vessel.” You will be come the vessel against the defilers that treats you like a non-korean, laughing [...]
Source: BrokenToys - Lum
Categories: Bloggers
21:56
What it has banned is spending virtual currency for real world items. In other words, it is more about defending the real world currency than anything else. I have mentioned in the past that many people in China regard the QQ coin (Tencent’s virtual currency) as solid enough to put savings in. Sounds like maybe [...]
Source: Raph's Koster Website
Categories: Bloggers
17:19
I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.
-Some U.S. Senator
Last week I decided I the Mountain Mtn Dew Game Fuel promotion was not really worth any more of my time.
I had my Battlebot, another companion pet in furtherance of my WoW achievement goals.
I had collected a pile of fuel for said [...]
Source: Ancient Gaming Noob
Categories: Bloggers
16:13
Dave Perry has a pretty compelling video demo of Gaikai, his new venture, on his blog. Like OnLive, this is also a “play a game remotely, stream a video and send controller data back over the wire” system, apparently just using Flash as the delivery mechanism.
(1) No installing anything. (I’m running regular Windows Vista, with [...]
Source: Raph's Koster Website
Categories: Bloggers
15:39
Server move is complete, and now that I’ve actually, you know, woken up, all the various broken things should be fixed.
Source: BrokenToys - Lum
Categories: Bloggers
15:39
Server move is complete, and now that I’ve actually, you know, woken up, all the various broken things should be fixed.
Source: BrokenToys - Lum
Categories: Bloggers
09:22
08:06
Braid McQuaid gives the first part in a series of Vanguard post-mortems. "The first mistake that would have a serious impact later in development was the verbal agreement with Microsoft that Vanguard was to be a first rate, AAA title......
Source: N3RFED - Cosmik
Categories: Bloggers
08:04
06:36
People complain a lot about the “gear gating” in Lotro. If you want to fight the new boss, you have to get the gear from the previous raids. We just want to experience the content, even if we can’t beat it with a PUG group.
When I think of it, isn’t almost everything in [...]
Source: KillTenRats - Ethic
Categories: Bloggers
06:02
Oops! There was a problem with the following:
-Please note that your password should be 5 to 8 characters long and is case-sensitive.
-Retype Password can not be greater than 8 characters.
I should have tested all the other password security features that it rejects. Bonuses for international characters and punctuation! At least it [...]
Source: KillTenRats - Ethic
Categories: Bloggers
05:30
05:12
Myrix recently made an apt post, the thesis of which was “put the game first, and don’t let the ‘MMO’ get in the way.” He asserts that just making an MMO isn’t special anymore, and he’s right. While the genre has an inherent appeal, in today’s crowded market you need to concentrate on delivering a [...]
Source: Moorgard (Steve Danuser)
Categories: Bloggers
05:05
As many of you probably noticed, the web server fell over and went boom quite a bit this week despite there being not that much traffic over normal to speak of. I’ll save my profuse and profane ranting at customer support for another time, and just note that the site’s DNS will be pointing to [...]
Source: BrokenToys - Lum
Categories: Bloggers
05:05
As many of you probably noticed, the web server fell over and went boom quite a bit this week despite there being not that much traffic over normal to speak of. I’ll save my profuse and profane ranting at customer support for another time, and just note that the site’s DNS will be pointing to [...]
Source: BrokenToys - Lum
Categories: Bloggers
June 30, 2009
19:32
This is BIG news for us. We have been waiting for a long time to release embeddable (think: YouTube videos) virtual worlds. You can now create a virtual space on Metaplace, and embed the world into your blog, website, or anywhere you’d like. The possibilities are really endless with this – you could have lobbies [...]
Source: Cuppycake
Categories: Bloggers
18:32
I’m doing a fireside chat sort of thing with Cory Ondrejka as part of the Metaplace Creative Series. You can log in to TheStage above at 2pm Pacific to participate — we’ll be taking audience questions too. We’ll be having a nice conversation about the future of virtual worlds. Cory, of course, was a prime mover [...]
Source: Raph's Koster Website
Categories: Bloggers
18:06
The Site
Is it the end of June already? I know that time flying is a cliche and all, but this month only seemed like it had about 12 days in it.
The only thing I really did to the site was ad something to the right side bar (way down at the bottom) the shows the [...]
Source: Ancient Gaming Noob
Categories: Bloggers
17:20
Today is a big day. We’ve released a feature that I personally think is highly significant for both Metaplace and for virtual worlds in general. As of now, you can embed a virtual world on pretty much any webpage, just like any other widget. It’s a small embed code, much like a YouTube video — [...]
Source: Raph's Koster Website
Categories: Bloggers
15:24
Thanks to Andy Schwarz for tipping us to this article in Information Week reporting on a Chinese government press release supposedly banning the sale of virtual stuff for real money. In the backchannel, Julian Dibbell reminded us that Korea did...
Categories: Bloggers
14:30
Good gawd guys:
In addition to its ongoing crackdown on Internet porn, the Chinese government has declared that virtual currency cannot be traded for real goods or services.
Virtual currency, as defined by Chinese authorities, includes “prepaid cards of cyber-games,” according to a joint release issued by China’s Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Commerce on Friday.
“The [...]
Source: Common Sense Gamer (Darren)
Categories: Bloggers
14:20
I found the answer: I was grumpy or in some weird state when I first fired up Runes of Magic. The game is actually quite good. It’s not original in any sense of the word, but it is good.
My original thoughts regarding UI and graphics remain, i.e. those are a direct rip-off of WoW and [...]
Source: Common Sense Gamer (Darren)
Categories: Bloggers
13:25
I am still happily playing the ultra-casual Wizard 101 MMO as my mainstay. I wanted to follow-up from my earlier thoughts. Currently my level 20 Storm wizard is right in the middle of the Kroktopia setting. I think I have spent about $20 on crowns, using them just to buy the content zones. The difficulty in [...]
Source: KillTenRats - Ethic
Categories: Bloggers
08:27
In Lotro I now have two max level characters. This is good. One would think this would give me more flexibility when looking to fill an open slot for the new raid. But it doesn’t.
I still don’t have the last two pieces of radiance gear I need to enter the new raid. [...]
Source: KillTenRats - Ethic
Categories: Bloggers
08:20
07:56
06:02
I have lost five pounds since getting into Team Fortress 2. Many of you are familiar with gamer diet, wherein you get a new game and forget to eat while you play for hours at a time, but I have been actively applying this to dropping some weight. First, willpower is a limited [...]
Source: KillTenRats - Ethic
Categories: Bloggers
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