Awwww, over-protective mommy ship takes cute baby alt-ship out for the first time! Yes, I’ve joined the ranks of EVE pilots with two accounts; the lure of EVE’s Power of 2 promotion and the savings in time by having a second account for salvaging, hauling, and extra drones was just too much to ignore.
If you think THAT picture is just too twee, check THIS one out.
So there you have it. Another alt is born.
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Hey, Aion’s out? Already? Wow, how’s it doing? Gold sellers everywhere? Let’s get some economics going. You are spending real money, that you earned, that could go for food or rent or gas on … nothing. NCsoft can always make more gold. They make it by the infinities every day. A resource that has an infinite supply that costs the producer absolutely nothing to produce has NO WORTH. So when you buy gold, you might as well be handing out dollar bills on the street. Anyway, Rer of (Insert Awesome Aion Name) says it a little better. Not only are you pissing away wealth on nothing, you’re ruining the game for everyone else.
Way to go, uber dude.
Stropp has some good ideas to combat gold spam. Simple economics, though, suggest the only real way to combat gold spam is to make NCsoft’s cost to produce more gold non-zero. To, like, make them adhere to the gold standard… So to speak. What if NCsoft had to give a dollar to charity for every thousand gold kinah they added to Aion?
Are you a MMO connoisseur who only plays the BEST, TRIPLE-A titles, like WoW and, um, WoW? Because the other SUB-AAA titles aren’t as good, so you’d be wasting your time on games like Maple Story, Wizard101, Chronicles of Spellborn, et al? Beau Turkey politely asks that you re-think what AAA means with regard to MMOs. Just because it’s a major studio sitting around in executive money chairs doesn’t mean they are the only ones who can make a fun, quality, game.
Gordon of We Fly Spitfires asks how it came to be that raiding is the end-game for MMOs? Why not something else — ANYTHING else? Well, Gordon, it all began with a little game called EverQuest. The EQ devs set their level cap so impossibly high that they never expected many people to ever reach it in the year and a half that they expected the game to run. They had a couple of dragons in the game as impossible challenges. But lots of people DID hit 50, and they found that if they got a hundred of their closest friends together and keep rushing at the dragons that they could eventually kill these beasts. So why is there raiding? Because MMO players INVENTED it. Since then, MMO devs have just been giving players what they ASKED for.
Maybe we should all get together and ask for something else?
If you’ve been stuck on Chaos MUD’s Wolfe Island for the last decade, the zone’s creator has come forth with a walkthrough, so you can finally move on with your life, maybe take a crack at the Telescope Room in Myst 🙂 Seriously, I love reading the stories from the old MUD communities that more than anything else, set the stage for our MMO hobby.
Krystalle at Massively has been playing around in the Eskil Steenberg’s Love MMO’s paid alpha. You’ll remember Love as the game based on procedurally generated content — a world generated by algorithms as opposed to the more usual method of having artists and level developers plan them out. This makes it possible for a single developer to to make an entire world (and is how big-world MMOs like Dawn and Dark&Light intended to make worlds too large to ever be explored). Full featured MMO or glorified tech demo? Check out the videos, or play the game and decide for yourself.
Pete of Dragonchasers has been waxing rhapsodic about Bioware’s forthcoming Dragon Age for awhile, and why not? Looks like a great game, but I personally find it boring to play video games by myself these days. Just having people around makes it more special. Doesn’t mean I won’t play it, though.
Pro tip: Use phrases like “waxing rhapsodic” to confuse your non-English-as-a-first-language friends. It’s fun!
Syp never understood the appeal of sandbox MMOs like EVE Online and Star Wars: Galaxies before, but since he’s been playing Fallen Earth, he’s become a convert. So, I assume we’ll be seeing you in highsec pretty soon? 🙂
Ramon of Dalayan Diary LIKES grouping in Shards of Dalaya, but dislikes HAVING to group in order to see all the best stuff. Yup. It’s nice to have the choice — but given a choice, people always choose the easiest path. The only way to have a game with a really quality group experience is to make that the best and most obvious choice, alas.
And lastly, the Ultimate Beer Run:
5 thoughts on “Daily Blogroll 10/8: Inappropriate Birth Metaphor edition”
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Glad you liked the blast from the past, Tipa. I was floored when I found a walkthrough for my MUD zone, and had a blast reading the quest I put together. It has me wanting to log into the MUD and try out some of the character classes that I helped create too….. the game is still running! =)
*Rawr rawr, hate gold buyers, rawr*
Lol, I laughed for a good minute at your pictures, well done.
Nice Megathron pics!
“…ask for something else?”
I keep doing that. It doesn’t seem to work. I need more alts to add to my Greek chorus.
I was such a noob back in the days of EQ that I ever time I hit the level cap, they kept raising it 🙂