The latest, via the Galactic News service, is that abandoned SWG housing is to be condemned as of thiscoming June.

If You Don’t Use It, You May Lose It!

Notice to citizens with inactive accounts since April 17, 2006: The following House/Structure Pack Up Program will commence June 5, 2007.

House/Structure Pack-Up Program

If your account has been inactive since April 17, 2006, any of the following structures on your account will be CONDEMNED, marked as abandoned and demolished beginning June 5, 2007: Houses, Harvesters, Factories, Player Associations.

Demolition Procedure

Starting on June 5, 2007, those structures that have not been reclaimed will be marked as abandoned. An abandoned structure will then be subject to demolition by your fellow citizens. Citizens will be rewarded for each structure demolished.

Demolition Rewards

Junior Wrecking Crew Worker Badge – Destroy 10 abandoned structures.
Wrecking Crew Manager Extraordinaire – Destroy 100 abandoned structures.

For each successful destruction of an abandoned structure, you will recieve one reward point. Reward points are redeemable at the Luck Despot for cool in-game items that you can use to decorate your own structures.

Reward Items (one point apiece):

Imperial Painting
Rebel Painting
INS-444 Holo-Pet Droid
CLE-004 Holo-Pet Droid
Xeno Couch
Xeno Recliner
Xeno Table
Xeno Desk
Xeno Desk Lamp
Xeno Rug

Find Out if Your Structures Are Condemned

If your account has been inactive since April 17,2006 and you left with your accunt in good standing, we have re-activated your account with up to 14 consecutive days of free access. This free access is available between April 17, 2007 and May 17, 2007. To take advantage of this free access period, your account must have been inactive from at least April 17, 2006.

Save Your Inactive Structure and Regain Your Veteran Status

Reactivate your account prior to May 31st, 2007 at 11:59 pm PDT.
Recieve an in-game painting featuring Obi-Wan Kenobi (one per account) as our “welcome back gift” for re-activating your account.

For more information about the SWG Pack-Up Program, check out the SWG Forums or the Pack-Up FAQ.

So a couple things spring to mind:

1. Making an event out of deleting expired-account structures is a very good idea. If they could apply that kind of lateral thinking to other new content in the game, that’d be something to talk about.
2. I’m gonna get me some Xeno furniture!
3. The obvious reason to do this is to clear out the worlds a bit in anticipation of a server merge. Player housing is (I imagine) one of the stickiest wickets to tackle when it comes to considering bringing SWG player together. Do you just back everyone’s stuff up and start fresh? Do you try to keep everything in the same place? What about structures that overlap? Who has precedence? There’s a cap to the number of player cities on a given planet; how do you decide which cities stay and which are deleted?

I really hope this is the prelude to a merge, however they do it. I’ve been wanting an excuse to jump back in for a few months, and having people to play with again would be a really great reason to do it.

update: I hopped on to poke around a bit and (sigh) didn’t see a single person. As usual. What I did see was that houses are already labeled with the (Abandoned) flag, so you can know for certain whether your house is slated for demolition. I took a walk around my neighborhood outside of Theed to get a sense of how much damage I’ll be able to do in a few months, and I stopped counting after fifty or so. Assuming I move quickly on the first day the event starts running, I should be able to catch that 100-buildings-destroyed badge no problem.

I never got confirmation that my media badge was okay’d for the Indie MMO Game Development Conference, and despite my efforts I couldn’t get anyone to confirm that if I drove for three hours I’d have something to attend. So … I didn’t go. My bad; I tried to register much later than I should have.

Just the same, I followed over the weekend via videos and Ten Ton Hammer’s Coverage Portal, and had a lot of fun doing it. More than anything else, it made me even more resolved to attend GDC Austin this year. We shall overcome.

Lots of linkage around the tubes about the event:

• MMORPG.com’s Introduction and Keynote coverage kicks off their posting about the event. One can only assume more work will be going up this week. I’m glad to see them taking a slower approach to reporting on the event; taking their time with work to ensure that they ‘get it right’ over the course of the week.
• Gamasutra has blurb coverage of Richard Bartle’s keynote at the event. “Bartle’s message to attendees was one of encouragement and warning. He suggested that the chances for big cash windfalls were unlikely for indie game designers, pointing to the fact that most attendees of Adventure ‘89 only broke even with their undertakings. Financial considerations, while important, Bartle said, weren’t the real reason most attendees had chosen to make their games … Bartle closed by calling himself a ‘a dinosaur in virtual world history,’ and requested that the current crop of independent creators become influential and respected enough to make him him extinct.” Dr. Bartle was blogging from the event as well, and I particularly found his rumination on ‘what he’s doing’ interesting.
• Brent was, of course, recording from the event, and VirginWorlds Podcast #64 is all about the IMGDC. One of his first discussions is with Adam from the Maelstrom podcast, and they discuss the presentation from Kelly Reud about Sex in MMOGs. GamersInfo has a pre-show interview with Ms. Reud, and they touch a bit on the same topics Brent and Adam do.
• My favorite coverage is (unsurprisingly) a discussion of The ‘Verse Behind Firefly given by Ron Meiners, Manager of Developer Relations for Multiverse.
• For another attendee’s perspective, Ethic has a two day writeup of the event over on Kill Ten Rats.

The next event to follow: The Online Game Development Conference, which Grimwell is going to.

Update:  More linkage from this past weekend! Psychochild discusses his talk on Indie games going International, GamersInfo has a rundown on Josh Williams’ Keynote, and the new Virtual Cultures blog (recommended by Raph) has writeups on Richard Bartle’s roundtable, Dr. Bartle’s Keynote, and Kelly Heckman’s take on community management.

Last week we took the advice from some of the engaged commenters here on the site, and conveyed ourselves northeast to Nektropos Castle. It was, pretty much from stem to stern, completely awesome.

Nek Castle is a crazy old rambling shack in the far corner of the Nektulos Forest. There are quests associated with it outside of the castle, but I noticed when researching the place that there were an awful lot handed out inside too. This one element of the instance, quests on the fly, made it well worth the effort of working through the instance’s crazy-fast repop rate. My experiences in EQ2 so far regarding quests have been mixed. Some of the quests themselves have been highly entertaining, but with no ability to share there’s always a lot of confusion about what we’re actually doing.

With all of us essentially given quests at the same time, it made it incredibly easy to coordinate what task we were doing at any given time. Several of the quests were ‘access quests’ that unlocked different areas of the castle. While I normally find this kind of thing a bit obnoxious (oh keys, how I hate thee), when the quest to unlock the wing of the castle are given out … inside the castle … it is a lot easier to swallow.

We only got about three or four things done in the course of our play session, because we spent some time figuring out where things were and such. Found some good resources during our run that will help more this week. Very much looking forward to the chance to get back into things.

Another element that has me looking forward to this week is my updated gear and spells. When I dinged 30 I went shopping to update my stuff, as you do, but I realized last play session that I mebbe kinda did things a little backwards. I grabbed some good plate gear, but I only realized in the middle of fighting last time that I hadn’t really spent a lot of time actually looking at the gear. Looking over my armor, I seem to have gotten a lot of +strength +stamina gear, and not so much +int and +wis gear. :P

So, this week I’ve been haunting the broker for deals on different level 30ish armor and updated spells. Just got a few new heals in the last few levels, and I really needed higher than Apprentice I. I splurged and got Adept level for my big heal, because the different between Apprentice IV and Adept I was huuuge. Gear-wise, I had to be very frugal, but I did find stuff that’s got me set on at least some +int and +wis on every item. Most excellent. The only thing I didn’t have time to research, and I wonder about, is whether I should consider going to leather or cloth armor. Do non-plate armor sets have higher bonuses to those all-important attributes, or does plate armor at each level have similar bonuses that I’ll be interested in? I’m pretty much only a healer, and I don’t need to worry about soloing; I don’t even really care about mitigation that much. More thought is required.

I’ve also been doing a lot of tradeskilling. Spurred by my renewed interest in the game, I’ve been bumping my level up again on that side of the equation. I wasn’t *too* far behind, so I’m a level 28 carpenter now. It’s been really awesome making furniture for myself and my allies, but err … now that I’m getting higher in level I kind of wish I’d focused on a different pursuit. My hope was that sales of carpenter crafts would sell fairly well, but unlike in Galaxies it seems like folks are fairly happy with simple apartments. This means that turnover is low, and carpenter stuff goes fairly cheaply on the broker. Our team has a set of pimped out apartments, but ehh … would have been nicer to be a Chef, I think.

As it seems folks are always willing to assist with advice, I have another question for the EQ2 vets in the audience: If you’ve played evil side, what do you think of the Inquisitor as a healing class? How does it stack up to more ‘pure’ healers in the game? Any suggestions for making me more effective in my party role?

The May issue of EGM just arrived … late, I’ll note … and what do my wondering eyes see in the Quartermann rumours column?

Worldwide force

Yeah, we’re all stoke for developer BioWare’s epic-in-the-making role-playing game Mass Effect, but we’d rather they light up something else … you know, like a new Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game. Well, they must have gotten my requests – I hear they’re forming a new team to make a KOTOR massively multiplayer online game. But that’s not all: My spies also discovered that their current PC-only Dragon Age is coming to the PS3. Oh yeah, and the DS game they’re making? Looks to be a new Baldur’s Gate.

1.) I’m really looking forward to Mass Effect. That game is going to be so kickass. I’ve already warned Katie that she’s going to lose her spouse the month that comes out.

2.) A DS Baldur’s Gate would be incredibly hot. A requirement, though: Has to have Minsc in it. You know, Minsc? “Evil, meet my sword! SWORD, MEET, EVIL!!!!!!” or “Squeeky wheel gets the kick!”? Man I love that game. I still greet people sometimes by very distinctively saying “Heya!”, like NPCs had a tendency to do in the game. Now I want to play Baldur’s Gate …

3.) BUT OMG do I want to play a KOTOR MMOG more. I really think Galaxies should have been set in the KOTOR timeframe in the first place. I love that setting; endless possibilities, no Lucas-created characters to get in the way, a still functioning Republic, lots of Jedi … absolutely perfect setting for a Massive game. Sign me up right the hell now please.

4.) Possibly even more interesting than this concept is the fact that they’re ‘forming a new team’ to make the KOTOR MMOG. That means that whatever they’re working, right now, isn’t the KOTOR game. Curiouser and curiouser, he said to himself.

What would you want to see in a KOTOR Massive game? I go ahead and throw one out there: I want to be able to play as a droid. HK-47 has got to be an interesting enough character to prompt PC droids, right?

Yay! Easy homework this week from Psychochild:

So, based on one of my comments in my last post, this challenge will be about licenses for MMOs. What makes a good license? Oh, let’s also talk about the potential trainwrecks since those are fun to laugh at. :)

This is easy, because I actually did to a lot of thinking about this earlier this week before I put up my own post on this issue.

Bad Idea: The Lost MMOG

I mentioned it offhandedly at the end of my post, that lots of popular television shows could have virtual worlds attached to them to increase viewer participation. This, though, would be a bad idea. Commercially, it could be a great success. If you licensed a client to keep things cheap you could probably launch with fairly quickly. All you’d have to do is build the world; no content required. The reason, of course, is that viewers would ascribe their own significance to everything in-world. Even technical errors would come to be seen as meaningful. “OMG, that tree is flickering. It must mean something!” As Scott Kurtz illustrates in a recent comic, as much fun as Lost is to watch it’d actually be a really crappy story to participate in. The worst part of this idea is that (if not with Lost per se) this ‘Virtual World attached to an ongoing confusing TV show’ is almost certain to be eventually done. TV shows that I think this would work for? Heroes, for sure, and maybe a puzzle-based world for Numb3rs? Anyone have any better ideas? I don’t watch much television.

Good Idea: Ghost in the Shell

As much as people knock Asian MMOG imports, there are a lot of great things about them. Maple Story may not be the bestest thing evar, but it does have some mighty kwai art. I can certainly understand why people play it. Now imagine a Massive game with more fully realized anime-inspired art direction (something I don’t think we’ve seen a really good example of here), and set in the NeoTokyo of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. An instance heavy game, there’d be three axis of development: hacking, soldiery, and cybertech. A perfect background for an episodic storyline, you’d want player to actually do a minimum of playing during the week. GiTS:SAC has a very tight storyline over two seasons, and both stories do a lot of slow unfolding and have a number of twists in the road.

Players could take the part of government agents, with perhaps criminal toughs serving as a second faction. Giving players the opportunity to play the content from multiple sides would be a definite bonus.

Like Cowboy Bebop, I think there would be a lot of work required to put this into some semblance of order, but I definitely think the world of GiTS is just as strong as Bebop’s. There’s the added bonus of a lot of cultural handholds for players; Bebop is fairly removed from our own understanding of the world, whereas Ghost in the Shell is set in a (admittedly transhumanist) future version of our own society.

As an end note: if you haven’t watched the Ghost in the Shell series … I highly recommend it. :)

Oh the puns, I love them so!

Again with a Citizen spotlight, we head into the mmogblogosphere. Aggro Me goes under the magnifying glass today over at GameSetWatch.

Some of his words, from the interview:

I love horrible groups, because they give me ideas for humor columns. My worst memories in an MMOG are probably technical issues. I remember there was a named in Zek my group and I fought for literally forty-five minutes in the early days of EQII. The server went down when he had just a sliver of health left. It’s also incredibly annoying to have the server go down in the middle of a raid and be faced with a lockout timer.

Three quick follow-up/clarification matters on my post from yesterday that got … a bit more attention than I’d anticipated.

• Gamasutra has a quickie interview with him clarifying what he’ll be working on. It sounds like nothing but good stuff; new Massive games being deliberately released to other markets, made by SOE, and no intentions of localizing foreign MMOGs here. Good show. Sounds like a decent guy, and I want to say again: I think what they’re doing (going after other markets) not only makes sense, but is awesome. Just to be clear.

• Mr. Smedley and I had an email conversation about the article, the start of which he encouraged me to post:

Your article about us spitting in people’s faces is just completely baseless and uncalled for.
1) He left IGE. Isn’t that a good thing?
2) We put it in the press release precisely to avoid anyone else thinking we’re trying to hide a part of his background. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to think we put that in there as an advertisement for why we hired him. Believe me IGE has image issues worldwide, not just in the US.

But thanks for thinking about the other side. You certainly don’t seem to do that ever. Obviously MMOGNation is an opinion piece, but that’s a weak commentary IMO. I don’t have an issue with the opinion that RMT isn’t a good thing. Certainly that’s a valid subject for debate and we’ve always been very open to that debate…. But the points you made about why we hired him are just weak.

The parts after that were much more constructive, for the record. I can see where he was coming from, though …

• Which is why I want to make a point here that I made over at MMODIG: belaboring a point is one of the fun parts of writing on the internets. I’d like to think I got across my feelings a bit more forcefully than Scott and a bit less forcefully than Amber Night. As Mr. Smedley points out, RMT is a subject that’s very much up for debate. Even though I know that shaking my fist at the sun is a hopelessly naïve thing to do … it’s still something I feel like I have to do sometimes. The Massive genre has grown up so fast, even just in the few short years I’ve been writing about it, that sometimes I feel like digging my heels in and being a post in the road. There’s still a part of me that very much wants Massive gaming to be just about friends having fun, without worrying about the real life monetary issues. That’s not the way of things anymore, and I know it. Doesn’t mean I have to like it. :)