Another week, and another wall of text for you to read. Couple of weeks with big stories now; I was afeared I’d have nothing to talk about until I saw Lum’s post. Oh Blizzard, you make news-discussion so easy.

Sometimes it’s the smallest flames that spark the biggest fires. A post to the world of Warcraft forums by Community Manager Eyonix started simply enough:

“As many of you know, the latest content patch, along with many great new content additions, contains technical counter-measures designed to combat in-game gold spamming. Our efforts to reduce in-game abuse and create a fun, safe environment for everyone are never-ending.”

While anecdotal evidence suggests these measures haven’t completely eliminated gold spam, they’ve certainly reduced it. In-game mailing systems in other games are choked with commercial messages requesting that the reader conduct some EULA-violating business. If you’ve ever gotten one of those, you probably noted that a lot of them come from the same source.

Also! Brian Crecente over at Kotaku put up a very nice writeup on the series. “Massive Damage!” Punny!

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Just call me a wanderer. This Saturday I’m going to be heading northwesterly, to hang out with some MMOG nerds in a new and interesting setting. It’s about a four hour drive to get there. I wonder if I’ll be the ‘furthest traveled’ one in the group? That’s always a hoot.

edit: Site problems Wednesday, so this post got snarfled, and now reposted.

Registration for GenCon was a few weeks ago, and I forgot to put up my schedule as I have a tendency to do. You’ll hear about this again, of course, because this year the Con of Cons is going to have a more vibrant games presence. Defintely going to try to get some face-time in with whoever shows up this year. And now I have a nifty-keen microphone to boot. Good times.

As a note, I’ll also be attending PAX in August and GDC Austin in September.

Here’s my current tentative schedule for Gen Con in August:

RPG01223
“Safehouse”
Shadowrun (Current)
Thu Aug 16 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm
A successful run. A clean getaway. A quiet place to lay low. So, anyone know why Lonestar is outside?

RPG00795
“Chalice of Love
Dungeons & Dragons (3.5 Edition)
Thu 9:00 pm - Fri 1:00 am
A cold town and rough weather bring you to the Stardust Inn. Where it all starts with a royal invite to a dinner party. After all a royal invite means good food, fine wines and good company and possibly some… Knock! Knock! A visitor at this time of night! An offered mission to retrieve a golden Chalice now sits on the table. A module with a twist per minute, just what you’d expect from the minds of the “Vecnians.”

RPG01245
“Sins of the Father”
Shadowrun (Current)
Fri Aug 17 noon - 4:00 pm
Shadows run in the family, and that means sometimes old debts must be settled. Even though you always knew there were things dad never told you, but a call from the Draco Foundation was the last thing you’d have expected.

SEM00111
“Secrets of Eberron Seminar”
Fri Aug 17 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Participate in an open discussion with Keith Baker and members of WotC’s R&D department to find out what’s next for the exciting world of the Eberron campaign setting. Product previews, humorous stories, and flowing ideas are only a few of the things we have planned to share with you.
RPGA00108
“Star Wars: Prelude to Defiance”
Star Wars (Saga)
Fri Aug 17 7:00 pm - Sat Aug 18 midnight
A routine cargo delivery gets a lot more complicated when fugitives from the Empire get involved. A chance encounter turns freelance traders into heroes, as well as enemies of the evil Galactic Empire. An adventure set three years after Revenge of the Sith for 1st-level heroes using the Star Wars Saga Edition rules.

SEM00113
“Star Wars Miniatures and Roleplaying Game Seminar”
Sat Aug 18 10:00 am - noon
Want to find out what’s on the horizon for your favorite Star Wars gaming products? Join members of WotC’s R&D department (and perhaps a surprise guest from Lucasfilm Licensing) to discuss upcoming releases and continue the 30th anniversary celebration.

SEM00122
“What’s Up with FanPro Seminar”
Sat Aug 18 noon - 2:00 pm
Wondering what’s up with FanPro? Then drop in to catch the latest info on Shadowrun, Battletech, Degenesis, and many other exciting projects we’ve got coming down the line.

SEM00065
“The Order of the Stick Rides Again Seminar”
Sat Aug 18 8:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Cartoonist Rich Burlew leaps into the proverbial saddle once more with a rousing series of examinations, anecdotes, and veiled hints regarding his smash hit fantasy gaming webcomic, “The Order of the Stick”.

RPG01264
“Bittersweet Symphony”
Shadowrun (Current)
Sun Aug 19 noon - 4:00 pm
A violin chair in the Boston Pops is a coveted job. And the current players are moving on or dying fast enough. According to Jimmy’s father he’s next on the list when a spot opens up. That’s where you come in.

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It’s not every weekend that I’m apparently involved in a scandal. It’s a tempest in a teapot, but I guess it’s more scandalous than my average day. Mental note: must take up more offers of buyoffs and hookers.

Last Friday I saw Scott Jennings’ note about the latest EVE Online Kurfuffle. I know we have a lot of EVE players on Slashdot, so I pulled a good submission out of the bin and put it up on the site. I was very explicit about the nature of the post:

It should be pointed out at the moment all of the evidence put forward is circumstantial; take with a grain of salt.

Despite my attempt at making the post neutral ground, there was a lot of spitting on both sides of the issue. The editors (ie: me) were specifically singled out in a few posts:

Seems like if BoB has an ‘in’ with CCP, Goons have an ‘in’ with Slashdot. Do you realize how fast this made it onto the Slashdot front page (before CCP even had a chance to respond that they would respond)? I personally think that game owners and site editors have whatever editorial discretion (which includes modifying game balance) they want over their game/site - it’s the player/reader’s discretion to play/read, so I’m not getting upset about it, but methinks there is a greater “meta game” going on here then most people are aware.

Today, once again, Lum comes to the rescue with a link to the official CCP IA investigation report. I’m guessing maybe I won’t be invited for more interviews in the near future:

The objective of this scheme was to permanently paint CCP as a biased and corrupt company that favors a select group of players over the rest of our community. In this particular case, instead of receiving notification of a possible problem and sufficient time to examine and address it, we faced a coordinated and hostile attack executed on our forums, Digg, Wikipedia, Slashdot, and other outlets at the beginning of a three-day weekend. We believe this speaks volumes of the intention of the person(s) responsible for orchestrating this scheme. Verification of this can be readily found on the forums of the people responsible—or at least could, the last time we looked.

Soo … excitement. If you want actual commentary on this, go read Scott’s comments on his post. Thought-provoking as always.

Me, I’m just posting about this because I want to be absolutely clear: I hate everyone equally. The idea stated in the Slashdot comments and intimated by CCP’s writeup, that folks putting stories on Slashdot are somehow involved, is beyond ludicrous. The only bias I have in putting stories on the site is that they should involve complete sentences.

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This is completely not MMOG-related, but I thought I’d share something that occurred yesterday. You may find it of some interest; if not, that’s why RSS feeds are so easy to read.

Twenty months and twenty eight days ago, myself and several of my friends began a Dungeons and Dragons campaign called “The Shackled City”. A series of adventures published in the module magazine Dungeon proved very popular, and so they were released as a hardbound book with stats updated and some plot smoothed out. I was extremely taken with the story, and at the end of August 2005 we embarked on what would prove to be one of the finest roleplaying experiences of my life.

Some background here: I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was ten. My first game was (sigh) the Palladium title Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. I played a kung-fu ferret, or something, and a good time was had by the nerdy. By the time I reached high school I’d been dubbed the GM for the folks I played with, and ran D&D, Shadowrun, and Rifts games for several different cliques between 1990 and 1994 or so. I wasn’t that polished, they weren’t that focused, and so they didn’t last that long. Except for an occasional game run for a friend in Illinois during high school, I hung up my GMing license between the start of high school and the end of my college education.

Before I’d even moved back to Madison after my senior year at Evergreen State had ended, I was planning a new campaign. That outing, called simply ‘Cormyr‘, got my GMing legs back under me something fierce, and lasted almost two years. I’ve since run two Shadowrun campaigns and a D&D/Eberron campaign, and when I went into Shackled City it was with a degree of confidence in both myself and my players. They were all RPG vets, my gigs as a GM since getting out of college had been generally successful, and the material (so I thought at the time) was fairly interesting stuff.

We dove in just a week after getting back from Gen Con the year before last, and have been playing (for the most part) every Sunday since.

Last night was the last session of the game. It wasn’t even a ‘real’ session, just a denouement for the characters and players, a look ahead to what the now incredibly powerful and wealthy PCs would do with their spare time, political connections, and ample financial assets. We also did a ‘director’s cut’ of the game, where I went back and explained the numerous additions and changes I’d made to the as-written modules. D&D modules, as you may or may not be aware, tend to be long on action and short on actual roleplaying/storytelling directions. Despite this, and what some people might tell you, D&D is first and foremost a game about playing a role. Combat is fun and all, but if there’s no reason for the characters to fight you might as well be playing nethack.

This campaign will go down in my life as a worthwhile accomplishment for a number of reasons. It seemed yesterday as though the players left the game with a high degree of satisfaction: first and foremost the goal of anyone running a tabletop game. If the players aren’t having fun, you’re doing it wrong. Another reason: we have a ridiculously complete record of the whole damn thing. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Alan De Smet (Alan in the comments here on the blog) and his brother Brian, the Shackled City Wiki alternates between the third and fourth entry on Google for the term ’shackled city’. The website documents the entire experience, from session one onward, and (as long as the site lives) will provide me with context for some of the in-jokes I expect to be with me for as long as I live. Apparently, you say the phrase ‘Unicorn-humper’ once, and you’re marked for life.

Most of all, I’m going to look back on this worthwhile accomplishment from the context of confidence building. When you’re in the thick of things, dealing with the game on a weekly basis, it’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of dice rolls and stat blocks. Looking back on the last year and half or so … I think I’ve done a good thing.

If you have some spare time on this, a weekday holiday in the States, go read over the adventures of seven friends and their wacky alter-egos. And ehh … if you read the quotes … please try not to judge. :D

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Two weeks now of EQ2 to catch up on. Apologies for the delay, but between the Barnett interview and then some general hilarity this past week, I’ve been focused elsewhere.

Wednesday the 16th and Wednesday the 23 saw the fabulous four of us doing what we’ve been focusing on since we got to the Enchanted Lands (and started ignoring Zek): working through the quest line to Rivervale. The week before this past week we completed quite a few pieces of the trail, all the way up to the infuriating “A Deputy’s Dog”. It’s an escort mission (which I’m normally not a big fan of), but not a terrible one in and of itself. You’re likely to get attacked by some bats on the way, but they’re pretty easy at the level we were at. With our strength as a group? Cake.

The problem is that escort missions are edge cases in EQ2. They don’t work the same way that a lot of the other ones do as regards updating your quest log. The result? We each, individually, had to do the stupid escort mission. This involved waiting for the dog to spawn, primarily, and then following it as it slowly made its way down the path to its destination. BAH. That took on the order of an hour just to complete the one quest. I really really they get that stuff fixed. We ended up doing some dueling to pass the time, and Brian reminded us why he’s the tank and we’re the backup singers. :)

Some general notes about questing in the Enchanted Lands: teh awesomez. I think we are all in agreement that so far this has been the most ‘purely fun’ zone to do our thing in. Except for the Heroic bears which aggro in threes and fours on us, TPKing us almost every time, TEL is a pretty calm place. There’s a lot of variety to the zone, allowing us the fun-ness of different places to hunt, and a ton of variety in what mobs we’re fighting. We’ve been starting to kill more goblins, and I never in a million years thought I’d be happy to be killing Runnyeyes again. Good times. Though they can be a bit frustrating, the quests that see us heading out to sea to confront the swordfish and the like are a nice change of pace from dry land.

An additional note to the EQ2 art team: We players are under the opinion that the lemur/scorpions call Lashers are some of the awesomest models we’ve seen in any game evar. We’re really looking forward to the expansion content, which I’m told has more inventive models yet. Nicely done.

This past time we pressed onward and upward, working for the museum society in ever stranger and more confusing ways. We called it a night while working on the Haflings of the Seamist Plains village for “I Hate the Hole in the Wall”. We’re just a few steps away from the three-part “Houndslayer” and “Last of the Tier’Dal” quests, which will have us in ye olde Rivervale proper, and me squeaking with glee. Getting to adventure in the revamped version of my favorite EQ character’s home city will be a blast.

Mostly over the last week I’ve been living vicariously through my wife. She’s played a ton of EQ2, enjoying the fun and fairyness of the Faydark. We have all standardized on Echoes of Faydwer, and so she’s been having a blast soloing with a winged Warden adventurer. She’s particularly tickled with the ‘One Room Acorn’ housing, and (despite only limited exposure to Crushbone back in the day) really enjoys taking down encroaching Crushbone orcs.

She’s leveling like a madwoman, proving out for me what a phenomenal job the designers are doing now that they’ve shifted the game’s focus. The comment I made in a post last week about it being sometimes obvious that the game wasn’t intended to be solo’d? Completely not the case in EoF. They know you’re going to be playing by yourself, and the designers be damned if you’re not having a good time.

We ended the game last week hovering somewhere in the range of 37. We might have the chance to play tonight and Wednesday as well, so we may well crack 39 before the end of the week. Good times continue in the world of Norrath, and come 40 we’re all really looking forward to striking out from the Old World for the content in DoF.

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Soo … for some unknowable reason, I’ve been invited to participate in a chat over at XFire. You know, the gaming service with the stats Raph likes? :)

They hold semi-regular debates about topics of interest to the gaming community at large, and on June 7th at 4pm CDT I’ll be on a panel talking about one of the biggies: The Console Wars. It’s going to be moderated by Dan Hsu from EGM, and the other folks on the panel include Chris Grant from Joystiq, Peter Rojas from Engadget, Brandon Sheffield from Gamasutra/Game Developer, and Niels Keurentjes from Xboxic.

A few things:

• I’ll admit it; this makes me a bit nervous. I’ve met everyone but Niels, and they’re all wicked, wicked smart. At least it’s not televised or anything, so I can’t ‘um’ and ’so’ my way through things. When I’m public speaking in a formal setting I’m actually really good. Not so much with this format. I just worry I’m going to misspell something unintentionally hilarious.
• About the picture. I have precisely 0 good pictures of me. I don’t have such a bad self-image that I think I really look like trash; I’ve just very rarely had a picture taken of me that didn’t look awful. So, my Taru-Taru Black Mage avatar stood in for me on the page. Cowardly? Yes. Appreciated? Yes. I think he looks rather dashing, actually.
• If you’re interested in a preview, my outlook is pretty much just like it says there on the site. I’ve got a Wii and a 360, and if didn’t have to sell my plasma or something I’d own a PS3 as well. They’ve all got games I either like already or am looking forward to. I need to think of something controversial to say; otherwise I fear I’m going to be the ‘boring guy’.

There’s going to be an ‘open chat room’ to debate around what we’re saying on the main floor, if you’re intersted in this sort of thing. Come on out and be a MMOG Nation supporter, eh? I think the other guys are likely to come with bigger posses. :D

… totally unrelated to this: The Wordpress 2.2 upgrade has made this thing’s backend absolutely lovely! Nice job, guys.

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My second Massive Update column has gone live on the 1up site, touching on the last ten days in MMO gaming. Starting next week it will only cover seven days (whew) and should go up every Thursday like clockwork.

The Big Story

Five years. Thirty million dollars. A company of dozens of people, and a fan community trusting in the Vision. All for nothing. That’s Vanguard: Saga of Heroes in a nutshell, and the big story in the last two weeks was the (unsurprising) purchase of the game by Sony Online Entertainment for an unspecified sum. The very first notice of the purchase came on May 15th from SOE”s Chief Executive Officer John Smedly on the newly-opened Vanguard boards, and in an interview with Gamespot. He explained the basics to an anxious community: the game won’t be changed in drastic ways, the priority at first will be stability, Brad McQuaid’s role will be as ‘consultant’ on the game. Like a white knight on a charger, Sony Online rode in to save the Vanguard players from Sigil’s dissolution.

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