Another visit with those wacky cats from the GWJ site had me chatting with them from a friend’s spare room over my vacationing-time.

A deconstruction of the GDC experience, as well as other weighty elements, round out the ‘cast. My personal favorite off-the-cuff discussion is the briefest debate between the awesomeness of Shodan and GLaDOS - so hard to choose between those murderous yet hilarious AI women.

This week Michael Zenke fills us in on his GDC experience. We talk about all the latest from the convention and get the inside scoop on why MMO developers seem to be on the verge of an all out cage match. We also have an awesome audio email!

Rabbit also jaws about a return to EQ, well worth a read.

Update: Thanks to Alan for pointing out that whatever exploit the bot is using hasn’t been resolved yet. This is troubling, and basically means I’m going to have to go scorched-earth with this site and the handful of other sites I host. As I’m traveling, that level of hands-on involvement isn’t possible at the moment. I’m back in Wisconsin on Friday so I’ll try to address this over the weekend. In the meantime, don’t expect another content update here before at least next Monday. Sorry for the inconvenience; I’ve got a couple of great GDC posts queued up.

It looks like MMOG Nation was hit by a passing hackbot - dropped some really nasty linkspam into the code of two posts on the site via (I’m assuming) a Wordpress hole.I’ve changed passwords, wiped the directory, and installed the newest version of WP - hopefully should tide me over for the time being.Many thanks to Eric Martindale for catching it via the RSS feed - could have been a lot worse.If anyone sees anything wonky on the site in coming weeks, please make sure to let me know via the contact email address on the About page.In other news, I’m having a pretty good vacation week.

The last day of GDC saw me getting ambushed by a really nice microphone - I’m not really one to turn those kinds of things down. Gaming Steve is well known in some circles, and I had the chance to sit in on episode 71 of his show.

• Game Developers Conference Day 3 Recap
  • How on earth did one guy create an MMORPG with a player base of 1.8 million people?
  • The Chronicles of Spellborn is still alive and kicking.
  • What are Cryptic Studios and Jack Emmert up to?
  • What did game designers rant about this year?
  • Why do game developers dress so poorly?
  • What crazy game did Steve Meretzky design at this year’s Game Design Challenge?
  • WebWars: EVE sounds freaking awesome.
  • Why is Age of Conan – Hyborian Adventures going for an M-rating?
  • Why is GDC the place to be if you want to get into the game industry.
  • Finally, we get all goofy after three intense days.

I felt really bad running out on them, but I had to catch the BART before the Freemont line stopped running from downtown.

I’m now in San Jose, hanging out with friends and having met up with my wife. I’m officially on vacation from now until thiscoming Friday, but I can guarantee that the upcoming week will be more postful than the previous. Though my posting speed at Joystiq and Massively was not what I wanted it to be (I am not a great liveblogger), I pretty much spent the last three days moving non-stop. I’m going to work to get all of the great content on my harddrive onto the internets - which will annoy my wife to no end, I’m sure. (She’s now going “Wait, what?”)

I just wanted to note that in-between running around and going to sessions I did get the chance to spend some time with the VirginWorlders - Brent, Brendan, Darren, and Troy. I roomed with Brent and Troy (and Brendan, one night) for the week. Aside from Brent’s master-class snoring, it was a great experience.

As with every GDC everything I didn’t write down or record with audio is a blur of memory -

• Drinking with Brent at the Francis Drake lobby bar talking about the future of the Collective.
• Raph’s passionate, cynical, downer of a WIM keynote.
• The amazing dinner with the crew, Hartsman, and Lady Sinea.
• The turning down of duck tongue fried rice by weak souls at a Chinese place.
• The future of MMOs panel - best thing ever.

I’m GDC-bound as of this morning, which is why the MMOG Nation Broadcast didn’t put out a new episode yesterday. Expect it during the week and (despite a week’s vacation after GDC ends) another one before the end of the month. Promise!

This is going to be a big year in SF; hope I get to see you there.

I really really like Lunar Fest. It’s, far and away my favorite holiday festival (though Brewfest bucked really hard for that position this year). The year before last I wrote a lengthy post about my impressions of the event, and much of those remain on the money. (I’m revisiting this on purpose, which is more than I can say for my recent post about small-group recognition. I first talked about that waaay back when the blog first started, and totally forgot. I’m going senile.)

Something I didn’t discuss then is how the ‘casual’ coin-collecting portion of the festival ramps up to hard-core difficulty when you try to ‘catch them all’. There are coins in the six core cities and the six ‘level 10′ towns, but the rest are spread willy nilly across the world of Azeroth - some of them in surprisingly strange places. Today I’ll go over my experiences talking to the Azerothian Elders, and a few personal tweaks I’d like to see for next year’s Festival.

Plus: you get to find out why there are Chocobos on this post. Wark?

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Via another post at Broken Toys, a few things have come to my attention. Namely, that content in this post about the Debonneville/Pierce case is something lawyers don’t want on the internets, or pointed out to people. Hmm …

For almost 5 years, Debonneville has dedicated his entire life to the creation, development, and success of IGE US, LLC (”IGE”). IGE’s meteoric rise from an under funded startup to the market leader culminated in a Goldman-Sachs investment of $60,000,000, which set the value of IGE at the time of $220,000,000. While Pierce, a flamboyant former child actor, has always been the public face of IGE, Debonneville has been the tireless working founder, responsible for the expansion and operation of the company … After living and working in Spain for a few months, Debonneville observed that Rector and Pierce had a very close relationship, one that did not seem normal between a 40-year old man and a 20-year old young man … Apparently, there were a multitude of charges related to the prior operation of a company specifying that Pierce, Rector, and Shackley had stolen money from the company and wasted corporate assets for things like the purchase of illicit drugs, living a lavish lifestyle, and criminal allegations of transporting a minor across state lines for sexual purposes. Upon learning this information, Debonneville questioned Pierce regarding the allegations, and Pierce stated that the claims were false and contrived as a setup by some competitors and former employees …

More after the cut.

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