I read up on Van Hemlock’s adventures in A Tale in the Desert over at his site, and had a wave of nostalgia sweep over me. I played ATITD waaaay back during the first telling, actually quite a lot. Even convinced my wife to join me, and for a period of about two months we had our own little well-loved campsite full of ‘the stuff that you use to make stuff’ in ATITD. This was long before tents and other modern conveniences they’ve since added, so it was sort of a sprawling melange of distaff/stonegrinder/etc. all spread out on a hill. We were just a short walk away from a nice little river (source of various resources), and a short walk in either direction to one of the temples of learning spread across the region. It was very pleasant, really, and aside from the fact that the game itself tended to be a bit boring I have nothing but amazingly good memories from my time in Egypt.

The person that made the experience what it was, was this chap named Kaizen. I’d made my camp within walking distance of his, and purposely. He was my mentor starting out, the guy that I sort of randomly fell in with as a newbie to the world. This sort of thing was heavily encouraged when the game first came out, something obviated a bit by the newbie island nowadays. Kaizen was well into the ‘elder game’ of the title, making sculptures for contests, participating in Tests, and (most enjoyably) making lots and lots of wine. He’d have wine-tasting parties and my wife and I would meet up with him and a few other Egyptians to try out his stock. There was a wine tasting skill, and as it developed you could detect more subtle tastes and variations.
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For haters who think that micropayments are something that just teens, tweens, and Korean people do, you would be wrong. Over on Massively today we have a megaton explosion of awesome CoX news. They’re moving the Architect to Issue 14 because of player feedback, dropping a ton of new stuff in Issue 13, and are generally proving how much Matt Miller doesn’t need Jack Emmert to rock the Casbah.

The bit I’m personally very interested in is this post right here all about the success of the City of Heroes ‘booster pack’ system. Begun with the well-received wedding set, they released the first of their series packs with the Cyborg set. It’s kind of downplayed a bit in the interview there, but I have it on good authority that the Cyborg set has a RIDUNKULOUS sellthrough rate. Not 1:1, probably, but really fricking high. As a result NC NorCal is sitting pretty with talented designers, regular income from subscriptions, and an occasional much-appreciated boost from the microtransactional content.

What I’d love to see them do is drop the subscription price to pay back the players for buying into the MT content. Maybe someday, NorCal?

Update: I didn’t notice this till I wandered over to their store. $4.99 for a 30-day limited item? That I can get for free at Christmas? The value of the Cyborg and the Wedding packs are relatively high, but this jetpack thing should be more like a buck. At most.

I’m not going to recommend Order of the Stick. If you aren’t reading it yet, you probably don’t want to be.

I just wanted to note that today’s strip was really funny. Like, really funny on a deep and profound level. I laughed multiple times at the punchline, because the full comprehension of the punchline requires SO MUCH FORTHOUGHT as to be a work of art in and of itself.

By my guess to full appreciate this single comic strip, you need to have read hundreds and hundreds of comic strips. Just to get to the point where you can even understand the strip, let alone find it humorous.

I love you Rich Burlew. Keep on shining.

Wow, what happened to snarkily ranting Tobold? I really like this measured, thoughtful Tobold!

Syp is right in saying that the problem of gold selling is the demand of gold buyers. But his solution is wrong, because he short-sightedly attributes the demand to notions of “morality or honor”, which is just plain silly. Player’s demand for gold is simply a function of how grindy it is to get gold, and what you need that gold for. And that are all questions of game design. It is a lot easier to solve the problem with good game design than to start a successful crusade to stop people from cheating in video games. Google has 80 million hits in a search for “cheats”, most of which are about video games, that isn’t something we can make go away if we all just hold hands and wish for it very, very strongly.

Okay, if he was snarking about me I might be a bit more testy. He’s 100% right through that whole post, though, and about the only thing I can add is that I can’t believe people are still high and mighty about secondary in-game currencies in 2008. I mean theres, what, a kabillion dollar aftermarket for that gold piece you earned from your Dailies in WoW, right?

The truth, though, is that people wanking about the dishonor of goldbuyers and the scourge of goldsellers should really put it back in their pants. For better or worse goldselling is something that’s … well, I’ll say it outright: in my mind it’s not an issue that players have to worry about anymore. Every game I can think of has done their best to deal with goldfarming and spammers at this point. Every one.  It’s 2008, and if you are still getting spammed by goldfarmers in-game it’s becuase the game developers want you to be. It’s as simple as that.

To clarify: I am being mostly flippant with that statement; obviously the developers don’t *want* you to be spammed. Ultimately my belief is that goldfarming hurts game developers in actuality, whereas goldfarmers are really only a perceptive annoyance/negative impact on players. Scott has a fantastic, AAA-level writeup on his solution to this issue at Broken Toys. Go read.

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I imagine you have probably already seen this, but Gamasutra reported on the Ensemble MMO-that-wasn’t, Halo. Simon asked me for a few words on the UI, and I offered him up some semi-cogent statements regarding the possible use of what were undoubtedly entirely placeholder assets.

“The character pane shows a health bar and ‘mana’ — or Psion, as is referred to in this title… The upper right icons are for basic character functions. The one on the far left would most likely be inventory, represented by the outline of a man.

Moving right, I’d guess that’s a ‘talent tree’ screen for customizing your character, most likely a powers menu (a brain to represent the Psion?), a titles or achievements screen represented by the trophy, and a support ticket system represented by the chat bubble icon.

There are many obvious tips of the hat here to the World of Warcraft interface. Simplicity and streamlined play appear to be the object of the game, but it’s interesting to see so many strange icons on the hotbar.

From the choice of abilities, it’s easy to surmise that that the character would have been some sort of melee/magic brawler. The upper bar has some similarities to the WoW UI modification Titan Panel - a favorite amongst players.”

I don’t really care about my name getting around, but it’s nice to see Massively’s URL in such prominent places.

I’ve been looking forward to playing Warhammer, to be sure - but whenever I thought about it, I anticipated playing a Goblin Shaman. And over on Thorgrim I’ve got one - he’s a lot of fun. But interestingly I’ve actually adopted a Warrior Priest and I think she might actually be my main.

My Gobbo Experience:

• I still love the class mechanics. The Shaman may be the most fun MMO class I’ve ever played. It’s awesome to be able to bounce back and forth between damage and healing, all with that distinctive green grin.
• The Greenskin starting zone on Thorgrim is a ton of fun to play … unless you try to play with other folks. Maybe I just keep having bad luck, but in the single digits almost everyone seems to have funneled over to the Empire vs. Chaos pairing. The Mythic folks say they expect this to get straightened out as more players go up in levels, but initially it kind of stinks not to be around people.
• Add to this the fact that there are a ton of Destruction folks and few Order folks, and it takes a long time for Scenarios to fire.

My Warrior Priest Experience:

• Mechanically, she’s got a lot going for her. All of the heals the class uses, it seems, are either passive or HoTs. As a result I can wade into melee with my hammer willy-nilly, dropping heals on myself just before I reach combat. My only frustration is that I’m having a hard time healing other people. I thought that I was supposed to see the secondary target of opponents when they were selected, but that only seems to work sometimes. That means if I’m attacking a dude that’s attacking someone else, I have to guess at his opponent to drop a heal.
• She freaking rules in PvE. I’ve barely died at all, and that was just through poor planning. Really looking forward to being able to get into some higher level PQs and helping out.
• Already have run into some uncompletable PQs at lower levels. Even the first one is sort of sparsely inhabited at this point, as everyone presses firmly on to other content. I’m taking thing slower, doing Tome unlocks and enjoying lower level PQs, and as a result I’m by myself sometimes even in the high-traffic Empire/Chaos pairing.

Scenarios are so much fun, I really think it’s a shame that they’re working the way they are now. I know the Mythic folks can make them work better. This is what I’d like to see:

• Cross-server scenario queues to increase the overall number of players in the flow.
• Generic scenario queuing; you sign up for a queue in general, and the game slots you into one of the three scenarios in your tier. I love Fires of Nordlands, no doubt, but I really like Khaine’s Embrace and Gates of Ekrund too.

I’m honestly surprised by how much fun I’m having with the game. I really thought I’d be playing casually and working primarily to get my epic flying mount in WoW … dunno if I’m going to meet that goal now. Damn you, Mythic!

Mr. Musgrove with the Washington Post pinged me for a few comments on the WAR launch, and to additionally familiarize himself with the genre. I stand by what I said in his article … with the additional note that I think WAR will be the #2 AAA game in the US marketplace, not worldwide.

Among fans of this genre, the buzz about Warhammer is good, said Michael Zenke, lead blogger at the Web site Massively.com, a site dedicated to news about online world games. “Hopes are riding very, very high with prospective players of this game,” he said.

Zenke has spent many hours exploring the test version of the game this year; it’s kinda like Warcraft, he said, but there are enough enhancements to make it compelling. “They’ve taken the framework that Warcraft has perfected and copied it over as best as they can, and then they’ve taken a lot of those game elements one step further,” he said.

Warhammer will be the No. 2 title in the genre within six months, he predicted. Considering the success of Warcraft, that’s high praise. “There’s no such thing as a World of Warcraft killer,” he said. “You can’t just turn off 10 million people’s interest in the game.”