273 posts and 215 comments later, it’s been over a year for my little braindump here. The official birthday was on the 9th, but umm … I was sleeping?

I did manage to wake up long enough to buy MMOG Nation a birthday present: a ‘pro’ flickr account. I’m going to move all of my MMOG-related screens there, in an effort to finish clearing out my old Gallery on Randomdialogue.net. I’m going to even try to get everything tagged and titled, too … though that may take a while.

In the meantime, here are some numbers for you to chew on:

Here’s to an even more linkful 2007!

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Didn’t Serpent Spine (you know, the EverQuest expansion I really liked) just come out? It’s time for another one already?

Clint Worley, Producer, Sony Online Entertainment:

As the thirteenth expansion for EverQuest, The Buried Sea will continue to challenge players with two new worlds to explore, ship-to-ship combat on the open seas against swash-buckling pirates, and a variety of new missions created especially for this expansion.

I know nothing’s nothing until you’ve played it, but the features they describe in the press release are so far removed from the core EQ gameplay … it makes me worry.

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The ‘Mage they call Jayne’ has produced his last Beta report, since Burning Crusade is due out next Tuesday. I’ve really enjoyed his ongoing commentary about the BC Beta, and his report on the eventful final hours is not something to be missed.

Ouch. Well, I’m dead, time to run back. It takes me a little bit to get back, and by the time I reach my corpse…? Well, there are two ‘colossal’ enemies to deal with now. Yep, the Powers That Be have decided that we in Org are hardcore enough to take on both the Colossus of Zora and the Colossus of Ashi simultaneously.

Update: Oops. I guess this is the last Janye column about the Burning Crusade Beta. It’s hawesome to note that he’ll still be writing about the game in the future. I really enjoy writers who are dedicated to a game, and get across their excitement well. I miss Milky’s FFXI blogging, on that note.

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Ryan over at Plaguelands has reposted a set of Vanguard tweaks, to get the optimal experience out of the Vanguard Beta. A sample:

1. Go to: [install drive]:\ProgramFiles\Sony\Vanguard\bin\vgclient.ini
2. Open it using notepad and make the following changes:
3. AnisotropicFiltering=off (which supposedly works for NVidia folks VERY well) Side Note: ALSO go into your card’s propertied and change this there as well
4. UseJoystick=False (I don’t know why but this did give me an extra 3-5 FPS)
5. UsePrecaching=True (For NVidia folks and some ATI folks, this is the holy grail)
6. UseTrilinear=False (For some folks this was an incredible boost)
7. UseCubemaps=False (I only noticed an ugly load screen, the game still looks fine to me)

I think it’s cool that Mort and Ryan are helping gamers to get the most out of the Beta.

…

The fact that a Massive game needs shit like “TURN OFF Hardware Occulsion while in the field and TURN IT BACK ON in town. The FPS gain in the field (for me) is close to 10!!!” relayed BY ITS PLAYERS speaks volumes about the playability of a game. This isn’t Beta anymore folks, this load is going live at the end of the month. Booo! Boooo!

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• Just announced - a modern day online game called CrimeCraft, built in the Unreal Engine 3. No details on whether it’s going to be massive per se, but 1.) online and 2.) modern day. Yay! MMOG devs might want to keep a weather eye on this.
• Gamers With Jobs (one of my absolute favorite commentary sites) has a great little piece on grinding on a game. Not the ‘grind’ MMOG players think of; really more of the obsession that gamers get when a great game puts its claws into you. “This unrelenting passion for a single game, this slave-mind, is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for the relentless ecstasy of my mania, and a curse for there might as well be no other game in the world. I am a thrall.”
• MMORPG.com’s reader awards were put up last week … otherwise known as the EVE show. I think it says a lot about the readers of the site that they were so freaked about CCP’s game. Whether you consider that ridiculous or not, I simply can’t believe so many people would prefer ‘nothing’ for the Best New Game award over the tremendous Guild Wars expansions. MMORPG.com readers are, apparently, tasteless idiots.

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I’m catching up with Holiday blogging, so you’re going to see some stuff about the end of the year this weekend. I’m hoping to get everything posted out so that I can pick up where I left off on Monday. So yay!

I wanted to point out a post by Moorgard from the last week of December about the uselessness of MMOG Beta tests. From his post:

It is a prevalent attitude among today’s MMO players that beta is a time to evaluate a game and decide whether it’s worth buying when it officially launches. Others see beta as a free trial period during which they can run through the game, learn its secrets and shortcuts, and get a nice head start on other players who will have to learn all the basics at launch. Both these attitudes are exactly wrong, and are part of the reason why it’s so hard to find good beta testers these days. Now granted, part of this is the industry’s fault.

I want to be ranty and say ‘It’s completely the industry’s fault, and game companies suck’, but I know better. In fact, while I agree that marketing has muddied the waters quite a bit with giveaways and such, I very much think player expectations are what have screwed up Beta tests. I am constantly amazed by the attitude of some gamers. To hear them talk, you’d think the very idea of a company making a game without consulting them is the height of stupidity. This is kind of a sticking point with me, and I think reflects on the psyche of American citizens in general. This attitude of entitlement is something I can go on about at length - ask me next time we’re in a bar together.

The point here is that the Beta test has to be about one thing - it’s either an event for the game’s makers, or it’s an event for the fans. If it’s an event for the game makers, the purpose of the Beta is to refine the game. The people ‘in’ the game should be playing it, yeah - it has to be fun. But there should be a purpose to the fun. There should be a process - individual elements tested, iteration on portions of the game, actual testing. If it’s for the fans, there should be events! With the small player population, you can do things that you can’t do once the game is out. You can create hype for the game, establish lore, make players want to play the game with their friends. Bump people to the higher levels, make people want that endgame content.

As someone who has been in a number of Betas, I always try to make sure I report a bug after every session. I’ve talked to a number of people that seem to think that Betas should be free gameplay time … if’n you want that, man, go become a game journo.

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The Escapist has up an interview between Russ Pitts and Curt Schilling, talking about Green Monster’s plans, and why the man started the company in the first place. The answer, according to him, is neither insanity nor a mid-life crisis.

“Curt Schilling: I had the idea about a decade ago. Probably longer than that, since I’ve been a gamer my whole life. The genesis of it was maybe 10 years ago but I really started to act on it probably seven or eight years ago, when I started my relationship with the people at Sony. I got into looking inside the industry and started to act on it a few years back and really started to move on it last year … This is something I will focus on explicitly and completely when I’m retired. Outside of working out for this season and my family right now, it’s taking up every minute of my day.”

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