I love the feeling of peace and serenity EVE Online gives. And then sometimes weird, exciting stuff happens. A corps-mate and I were testing weapons fire and tank abilities last night when a battle broke out behind us as rival corps met outside a station. It was great, and for some reason reminded me of the very first story I ever read about EVE Online, about The Great Scam which put the game on everyone’s long range scanners.
I haven’t done a blogroll in a few days, what with the holiday and being the on-call developer this week. So this will be a short one.
The biggest news from yesterday was of the professor who role-played a griefing PvPer in City of Heroes and made people angry with him – for SCIENCE. First off, who cares? Who doesn’t expect childish behavior from PvPers? Of course, the point is that the City of Heroes players had decided upon an unwritten code of conduct that the professor chose to ignore.
Still struggling with the “why should I care” bit. But I’ll be online in Wizard 101 talking up my neo-Nazi propoganda tonight… FOR SCIENCE.
Tobold noted yesterday that with the Chinese WoW servers offline for an extended period as ownership changes hands and the Chinese government decides how much it wants a Western MMO to corrupt its children vs the home-grown varieties of MMO crack, that WoW no longer can brag about 11 million players. Instead, it’s probably just keeping ahead of… Free Realms…
Yes, I know a WoW player is worth more than a Free Realms player. But people brag about the numbers so much, and even a FR player is worth more than a Chinese player, given the very, very, very small amount of money Blizzard makes from any given Chinese player.
Faced with a spare WoW account, Saylah does what anyone would do – take the new duo out and three-box her way to fame and fortune in Azeroth. She could just run three screens and switch between them, but that would be boring. Much better to jump right into the deep end with carefully chosen macros and helper programs to make things simple and easy.
Syncaine identifies the major problem with most modern MMOs – the game won’t let you fail. You simply cannot make a non-viable character. If you can make a crappy character, his reasoning goes, then you also have the ability to make a really custom character that plays to all your strengths and is truly individual.
I remember putting lots of agility on my EverQuest druid because I thought it would help her get hit less. As opposed to, say, wisdom… she was gimped from that moment on, but I always treated it like an endearing handicap. But then, attributes in EQ were kinda broken.
Is Aion already yesterday’s MMO? Where just a couple short weeks ago, Aion was being hailed as the perfect polished paragon of WoW-like pulchritude, now people are wondering if it’s just too much of the same old. Keen is already bored with leveling characters through the cookie-cutter content-on-rails newbie areas (mostly identical for both factions, too). Syp sees nothing in Aion he hasn’t seen done better in other games, so why go through it again?
I loved what I saw in Aion, but I pledged to myself not to play any more grindy level-to-the-endgame MMOs. I have EQ2 for that, and one is enough. So I won’t be playing Aion, despite having had fun in it.
Warhammerer has been writing for some time now about a new MMO just out of beta, Ether Saga. I really haven’t heard much about this game anywhere. Sounds like it’s still shaking out those new game bugs, though.
And lastly (since I have just been paged to GET TO WORK), Gordon at We Fly Spitfires writes about why single player RPGs can never give the same sense of satisfaction and accomplishment found in an MMO – accomplishments mean nothing if there’s nobody to share them with. I agree with every single word.
Wow, Wednesday already! Week goes by so fast. See you tomorrow, and keep gaming!