EVE Online

In EVE Online, at my new home at the Sisters of EVE base in the Arnon system, with Mining IV, Refining III, and two Miner II mining lasers and purely selling in-system, I make about 27.5K ISK per minute of mining. If I processed the ore at my current level and sold it in the best market within seven jumps, I would make about 26K ISK/minute of mining, not including travel time. The question is, how many sessions of mining would it take to pay for the skills and equipment necessary to make refining more profitable than just selling the ore straight with no additional skills going toward mining? EVEMon has me at about ten days to having the skills necessary to fly a ORE Retriever mining barge… EVE is the first game I have HAD to play with a spreadsheet open. ...

I’m in a sort of MMO rut these days, and it’s not because MMOs have let me down. They haven’t; most of the MMOs I play regularly are extremely good, and if I’m not having much fun, I’m sure it’s not he game’s fault. I’ve been thinking about the old Bartle method for classifying MMO players as having varying degrees of four attributes, a character sheet of sorts for gamers – Explorer, Socialite, Achiever and Killer. Everyone has each of those to a lesser or greater extent. Explorers like seeing something they haven’t seen before. Socialites like doing things with other people. Achievers want to have the most or be the best, and Killers want to hug puppies and donate to worthy charities. The Bartle test shows me to be a heavy Explorer type, with about equal shares of Socialite and Achiever, and lastly, far and away the least, a Killer. ...

I saw Star Trek Friday night – and it was great. Kinda made me wonder if someone could do the same for Star Wars… like if, somehow, Jarjar Binks went back in time to train Anakin before Qui-gon Schindler got to him… After an exciting Free Realms weekend in which the log-in servers were down for many hours, I still got some time in. Restarted as an archer and got to level 7, right in the middle of the grind to level 10. Tobold got his blacksmith to 20 and finds the whole job pointless since fairly cheap RMT weapons you can get at level 1 are way better than the best weapons you can craft at 20. ...

Apologies to Randall Munroe Yes, I really do believe you can’t honestly review an MMO without investing yourself in it for a fairly substantial bit of time, so that any oddities with controls and stuff become second nature and you can understand the core of what the game developers were striving for. A 1999 EverQuest review could have written all about the low polygons and stiffness of the character models, the laughably sharp-cornered world and so on, and missed the forest for the trees. You have to play a MMO long enough to see and appreciate the forest before you stamp a score on a review. ...

My new computer is due to be delivered today! I’ll be at work, of course, but maybe I can finally find their delivery center and pick it up afterward. My hope and fervent dream is that this will be the computer powerful enough to run Lord of the Rings Online…. Anyway. A couple of weeks ago, Paragon Studios introduced the Make Your Own Farm Mission (aka Architect) system, where players could find a badge they wanted to gain, and find the perfect mission among the thousands created for this purpose to gain that badge, or that level, or whatever they liked. Experience with similar level creators in such obscure games as Diablo, Diablo II and LittleBig Planet wasn’t clue enough that many players would use their new powers to create and play custom missions to benefit their characters. ...

Welcome to Monday! We had a gorgeous weekend here in Connecticut. The cat loved sunning herself in every patch of light, shorts weather for sure, and everything is in bloom. Free Realms is also in bloom. FR’s beta ended yesterday with a huge bash in the port town of Seaside. Oz of Kill Ten Rats isn’t feeling the love, and cites deceptive practices in game among reasons why he doesn’t feel FR is ready for prime time. Tobold responds by pointing out the collectible card game was not nearly as expensive as Oz opines, or that beta testers were required to pay to test member-only content, and offers his own thoughts on the Free Realms beta. ...

Welcome to the weekend! It’s fantastic weather, so gonna keep this short. More news about the ex-Mythos developers’ new game, Torchlight? The Runic Games Fansite has a FAQ complete with everything they know about the fantasy Action RPG and its followup MMO, and Runic Games Insider’s Taylor Balbi has really long interviews with a few of the devs with the nittiest, grittiest details. Keen at Keen and Graev has a rather positive look at Free Realms. It’s a fun game, but will it appeal enough to kids to become a success? ...

As near as I can tell, nearly 900 people came to this blog yesterday just to name the Marleybone builder turtle in Wizard 101. That’s fantastic! There’s still a bunch of time left, and as long as the contest is going, there’s going to be a big button over there on the right leading to the post since, this being a blog, stuff scrolls off the front page almost immediately, and the Name the Turtles contest is already buried under THIS post, and a long, long comic about two hobbits discussing how cool a X Files MMO would totally be. ...

The original definition of “blog” was as an abbreviation of “web log”, where you’d point out interesting places you found while surfing. I don’t really have anything to write about today – I did 1.1.11 in LotRO last night on my hunter and started in on the Forsaken Inn quests, and played Free Realms for a couple of hours but I can’t write about that, so… welcome to my web log! ...

In 2007, you could have surprised absolutely nobody by predicting that 2008, last year, would be the biggest, best year ever for MMOs. Triple A titles abounded – Age of Conan and Warhammer Online were both just going to tear WoW a new one, but heck, even WoW was coming out with its second expansion. Pirates of the Burning Sea would take MMOs into a new direction, Chronicles of Spellborn would be an indie hit from Europe, and Flagship would be following up Hellgate: London with their MMO homage to Diablo II, Mythos. ...