Or: Why I can’t wait to play Valve’s first MMO.

I was sitting in my hotel in San Diego earlier this year, pondering a blog post and the day’s events. The sun was on the horizon and to keep the back of my mind occupied I popped on the television. Watching cable TV is a rare treat for me. Primarily I watch specific TV shows via iTunes or Netflix, so channel surfing is really only something I do for the 30 minutes or so I’m on the elliptical at the gym.

Animal Planet, Discovery, and other channels sometimes run shows on zookeeping or zoo design, and I just can’t get enough of that stuff. What can I say, I like animals and how stuff gets put together? In any case, that San Diego evening I entertained myself by occasionally looking up to see a hippo being fed or a bear cave being cleaned.

The thing of it is, in some ways those zoo animals have it better off than your average MMO player. I’m not just talking about free food and no rent - I’m talking about enrichment activities.

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This week the Friday films are all about traveling. First up we’ve got a quick clip of Jacob’s Ladder, my faithful City of Heroes character, as he makes his way through the troubled streets of Paragon City. Then there’s a pair of clips from the first night Blizzard opened up the Arena server (on the 1st). It was bedlam and chaos as people waited forever to get into Arena events - mostly PvPing each other to pass the time.

The last clip comes with a story. In it you’ll see Grodin, my Dwarven Paladin, fighting with Arakkoa in Hellfire Peninsula. I shut off FRAPS’ video capture just a second before another birdman rushed my character. He was joined by one of those blasted owls, and the fight was really on. I held my own for a bit, took out the birdman, but it was quickly obvious I was going to lose to the owl. So I did what any self-respecting pally would do: I bubbled and ran, down into a cave I’d partially cleared out along the chasm’s floor. Unfortunately as I ran I managed to pull another Arakkoa. I healed a bunch but I was OOM and I was sure I was done for. At this point I was quite a ways away from the owl’s spawn, so I backed up some more hoping he’d de-aggro and leave me alone. All of a sudden there was a burst of light, and I was at full health and mana. I whipped out the big guns and dropped both of the mobs in no time flat.

I realized, as I stood there over the corpses, that I’d dinged. And not just any ding - an exploration ding. By backing up just that bit farther I’d gotten the XP gift for finding the Den of Haal’esh proper, leveled up, and had my health/mana restored. Hilarious. An instant from death and I’m saved by a lousy 1000 xp or so. Priceless, and one of the many reasons I play these games!

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A bunch of truly fantastic news and features have gone across WoW Insider and Massivley in the last few days. I had to share me some love:

• A wrapup of the pounding that cross-gender ‘research’ took at the hands of Bartle and the Freeman.  I particularly liked the comments on Raph’s blog; almost nothing from him and several really nice retorts from the peanut gallery.
• Will Dobson put together a fantastic look at the Spring Festival going on over in LOTRO. It’s not only interesting and informative but a great chance to show off our new gallery software. Nice!
• The WoW Insider team headed to the Tourney test realm and came away with some amazing stuff. Amanda Miller has a writeup of the events, but you really have to check out the gallery of their experiences. I want to ride a giant Raven Lord!
• A FANTASTIC announcement from NCsoft as they unveil the beginnings of Issue 12 for City of Heroes. I really love the sound of this content - definitely going to have to check it out. In fact, talking it over with the EQ2 group, it sounds like CoH might be our next destination once we hit max level sometime near the end of this year.
• I remember seeing the flying mounts at the end of Vanguard Beta over a year ago now, and only now are they getting put into the game. A little sad, but still great news for the players who have been waiting patiently for this content to drop. Game Update 4 is live!

This has been a crappy, crappy year.

• Blizzard releases an expansion that’s great - and I’ve barely played it.
• Vanguard flops
• Cryptic sells CoH, and now is completely silent.
• WAR and Conan are delayed until 2008.
• Ryzom goes under, again.
• Perpetual explodes, sending shards of two unreleased games flying.
• My EQII experience has gotten kind of crappy.
• Auto Assault closes.
• LOTRO releases to relatively positive reviews - and I’ve barely played it.

Most distressing for me, personally, is that in the last two weeks I’ve killed both of my gaming PCs. I now have no way of playing even World of Warcraft, let alone something like AoC or Pirates. You wouldn’t believe how much you want to play a MMOG when you can’t.

About the only thing I have fully appreciated this year is Eye of the North, which I’m now really enjoying on my wife’s PC.  I’m almost done with the Norn quest line … more about that later.

The thing that prompted this post was Fury’s demise. I said publicly in a few different places that I thought it had potential, and that I was hopeful for the little Aussie game studio. Just embarrassing. Maybe I thought that they’d take a little more time to get it right before releasing?

Whatever. Burning Crusade is obviously an unqualified success for Blizzard and the Massive industry as a whole. In fact, this year could be considered the year that Massive games went mainstream. Truck commercials, South Park appearances, Mr. T and Shatner … the only problem is that one game in the genre has gone mainstream. As a whole, new ventures this year have floundered or been delayed, while several existing titles have sunk beneath the waves. For better or worse, most of my MMOGnostication predictions have come true. That makes me bloody sad.

So: screw you 2007. Hopefully ‘08 will offer bigger, better things.

City of Heroes is no longer a Cryptic Studios venture. Bet you weren’t expecting that one, huh? The official notice is full of platitudes, assurances to the players, and statements about unity of purpose between Cryptic and NCsoft-NoCal.

But yikes. I … imagine … MUO is still going to be published by NCsoft, but that’s just one less firm link between Cryptic and NC. Fun to watch the gears turn, huh?

Additional: And now you get free CoV! And prestige! And a debt removal! Yikes!

Additional: Oh … MUO is a Microsoft-published project, Lum reminds me in the comments. Thanks Scott. :)

Sooo … goodbye NCsoft/Cryptic.

MMOG customer service is getting better, right? Almost across the board, the experience of getting help inside your favorite gameworld is getting less onerous.

Well …

Herein lies the tale of one man in uniform who just wanted to get his Hero on while he was abroad, and has been given the run around for going on three months. I’ve done what I can to help without going public with this, and it’s gotten him nowhere. Soo … I hope this informs and entertains.

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I’ve been wanting to comment on my gameplay in CoH for a bit. Most of my thoughts are fairly standard stuff for everyone who’s played the game. This past week, though, Issue 10 dropped … and it’s a hoot and a half.

Massive cluster-death right outside the train stations, a brand new zone, higher drops on costume pieces … the new issue has stuff to like for almost everyone playing CoH. Some folks are even using the phrase “best Issue evar“, which I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say. (I’m still playing through the content from Issue 5.)

I’m something of a talker, so I’m going to go ahead and babble about my experiences both Issue 10 and otherwise; feel free to skip the bits about old content if you’re just interested in the new hotness. (sniff)

If you’re thinking of re-upping to check out Issue 10, I highly recommend it you have no excuse! They’ve reactivated your account through Sunday!

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