MMORPG

This week marks the start of the Champions Online open beta, the end of Aion’s closed beta, the beginning of the Fallen Earth open beta, and right now, MMO gamers just have to be asking themselves why they PAY for games when they can just jump from beta to beta? Gordon of We Fly Spitfires thinks the whole “beta” thing has simply gone out of control, with the true meaning, if any, entirely lost. He looks back to the times when a game’s release date meant something. DM Osbon has sworn off betas since Warhammer’s escapade last year. ...

To mix things up while gathering enough loyalty points for a Gallente Navy Comet blueprint (so I can see if I can make copies of it and thereby enter the 30m ISK-a-pop Comet business), I moved my base from Aunia to Marsalla and offered my services to the Public Relations department of the Federation Navy, reasoning I could use relatively safe courier missions to quickly raise my LP total. ...

The first of three comics set in Champions Online introduces Moonmist, the least famous member of the supergroup “Celestial Light”. This comic was made early in closed beta and the game’s look has improved substantially since. Also, the plot of the comic has absolutely nothing to do with the actual storyline of the tutorial.

In honor of finally being able to fly the Dominix, a collage of most of my ships (to scale). Some I don’t have anymore, like the Myrmidon, which was pinned down by (no exaggeration) about twenty ships, two of which had warp scramblers, and taken apart. I was just a couple of hours from being able to fly the Dominix battleship, so I helped with a mining op for a little while, then got the ship, crafted a stable fitting from spare parts – including two warp stabilizers – and headed into the deadspace encounter. ...

There were so many people at the Second “Back to School” Meet-and-Greet thrown by the bloggers at Evil Theurgists and Diary of a Wizard that you could hardly hear people begging for dates and treasure cards! I was thrilled to meet so many new friends and fill up my friend list a little :) It was a lot of fun! Afterward we went and let Jade Oni know exactly HOW to play a Life Wizard … in STEREO!

This has been a pretty decent week in EVE Online, which is running neck and neck with Wizard 101 as my main game. Earlier, Otakudyne corp officer Sredans made a Dominix battleship for me as reward in part for a couple of nights of mining; I’ll be able to fly that Sunday evening. I was kinda disappointed to not find the skill to fly Gallente Battleships among the skills sold by the Federation Navy loyalty point store, so I put in a BUY order for the skill at a 20% discount from the average regional price set to expire just about the time I will need to train it. If nobody sells me one for my three million ISK, I’ll just buy it, no big woop. After all, I AM a millionaire. ...

Apparently, Diablo-esque MMO Mythos, formerly developed by the Diablo-esque developers of Diablo, who lost the rights to their game to Korean publisher HanbitSoft, is apparently … coming. Details are slim, but it looks as if Redbana, publishers of the online dance game Audition, will also be taking on a newly relaunched Mythos. Head to the Mythos site to sign up for the beta… Thanks to Heartless_ for spotting their solitary tweet on Twitter about this! ...

I THINK this screen shot came while we were raiding the City of Mist for Jalanea’s shaman epic. Remember when guilds used to raid the City of Mist? Something I really liked about EverQuest was the mix of raid targets in leveling zones. Now it’s all instances and keeping people away from each other as much as possible. Sad. ...

Here’s how to find the banker – or any other NPC – in Kelethin. This works for NPCs in any city. Wolfshead was pretty positive about the Greater Faydark area in general, and I appreciate that – I think it’s a great starting zone – but to flatly say it’s impossible to get a guard to show you to the banker unless you know the banker’s name, or that it’s all that hard to get around the city with the map, well…. ...

EVE Online wants you to make money. It’s hard NOT to be swimming in the stuff. So your given level 3 mission might have a couple dozen enemies in it. You get a bounty on every one you kill, they drop loot which can sell for a fair bit, can be salvaged for loot worth a million or more (sometimes much more) if you get a decent price, and many have asteroids that you can mine with very little danger that anyone will locate you. I’ve been sending my mining proceeds to one of the corp officers, and last night he parked a battleship at the local trading hub for me – the mainstay of the Gallente Federation Navy, the Dominix drone tank battleship. Half a kilometer of hurt clad in a meter-thick skin of tritanium. Now I have to train for a few days to be able to fly it to my base in Aunia – the EVE Online equivalent of bringing a new battery and a pair of jumper cables to check out a used car. (THANKS, RED!!!) ...