(Shhh! Hello Kitty Online’s closed beta started yesterday! Expect a HKO First Look once I’ve found my way around).
Massively reports that EVE Online’s next expansion, Dominion, has just been announced. Dominion brings a new focus on planets, undoubtedly setting the scene for EVE’s planetbound companion FPS MMO, Dust 514. EVE is also adding social media functionality to the game, and I have no idea what that means. Tweet every mission? No clue. Lastly, the walking around in stations expansion is given a name, Incarna, so I guess we’re stuck in our pods for at least another few months.
In the “But, I Want To Play A New Game Right Now!” department, Syp brings news that Dungeons and Dragons Online’s F2P mode is live, so, like, log in and kill stuff. I played D&D, the pen and paper game. We never had to grind dungeons to level. Sure, it would be impossible for Turbine to make new content every month, but the thing about an adventure is that you only go on a certain adventure once, right? Like, once you’ve spent the entire movie training to blow up the Death Star and then it goes boom, at least you don’t have to worry about doing the whole thing all over again.
Should children be raiding in WoW? Beau loses his cool over a podcast that gives advice on getting your 11-year old into raiding. I’m right there with him. Children should not be playing games that suck all your time when they should be out living their lives. Looking back on my own time, as an adult, sucked into full time raiding, those years are GONE. I would NEVER wish that on a child. Letting your young child spend hours each night playing WoW or any other timesucking game is a kind of child neglect. Do you really want your kid growing up, learning how to interact with people via what you hear over voice chat while raiding?
Syncaine’s staggered by the (apparent) mad rush of bloggers to return to WoW following the announcement of next year’s Cataclysm expansion.
… Is EVERYONE from the blog world back in WoW right now? Failbears all of you! (Like carebears, but when carebears go back to WoW they become failbears) So a month of nothing but “so I did this daily just to grind this rep/token/whatever, it was cool” reading huh? Awesome. To counter this I’m going to start reporting on all the iron nodes I hit in DarkFall (which according to my fiancé is all I do in that game), but each node around Hammerdale I’m going to give a different name, and then phrase them like this “Monday, I went out and complete the Northern Bob daily, just to work on my ‘smithing’ rep with the ‘character’ faction. I love the Northern Bob daily because while it’s both north and called bob, it gives nice rewards and I don’t have to commit hours to get something done”. God I’m bored just writing that…
I’m kinda of two minds about what I call “gameplay” blogs, where someone just posts what they did that day. If I play the game, they’re interesting, and if I don’t, I skip ’em. Remember, like malaria and syphilis, you never entirely get over World of Warcraft. So I’ll auto repeat the page down key on a month’s worth of “I did something in WoW today!” posts because I know those bloggers will come back with cool stuff in the future.
There’s a reason, after all, that I don’t often post about what I did in EVE today 😉
The infosphere was abuzz with yesterday’s news that Imperial Disney had annexed Marvel comics. So I guess we’ll be seeing trailers for Disney’s Princess Collection ahead of Wolverine 2? Seriously, when I think of Disney together with Gazillion’s in-development “Avenger Babies” MMO, just one word comes to mind. Disaster. Synergy.
Information about EQ2’s upcoming “Shard of Lurrrrve” update continues to seep from the test server. Ogrebears has a quick, thumbnail overview of the different kinds of achievements you’ll be linking to prospective group leaders in the near future, while Stargrace takes a look at the “chronomagic” auto-mentoring system.
Re: WoW achievements, and I ask because I don’t know. Are the group leaders who are insisting they be sent stats and achievement links before they will let someone in the group, ever required to link their own stats and achievements? EQ2 is deep into the “Must have T2 and Mythical” territory already. Achievements are just gonna make EQ2’s community even more like WoW’s.
Warhammermer has all the good news on Free Realms’ daily slot machine lotto game. Spin the wheel, get a prize, step right up. I have no idea how that game is doing. I really liked it, but I have a career MMOer’s short attention span.
The Friendly Necromancer reminds us that tomorrow is the first anniversary of the launch of 2008’s most original new MMO, Wizard 101. And he even baked a cake! There’s MMOs out there, a LOT of MMOs, that I regret losing hours of my life playing. Wizard 101 is NOT one of those. I have enjoyed every moment in the game, and I still play it daily, leveling a new duo through the worlds (currently in Hyde Park, Marleybone). So, happy birthday, Wizard 101, and thanks, KingsIsle!
“Are the group leaders who are insisting they be sent stats and achievement links before they will let someone in the group”
Yes…its so annoying…
From what I have seen so far, it doesn’t sound like the EQ2 achievements will be anywhere near as intrusive as WoW’s. There are websites out there that will query the armory and not only tell you whether a player has done the instance you’re looking for but how many times (final boss kills for all current instances are tallied on the publicly available stat page) and how far above the level of the instance their gear is in one convenient snobbery number. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a PUG leader asked to link their achievement, but it’s a largely moot point since people who make such requests generally come from guilds that have raid content on farm. Even knowing how many times they had done the content won’t tell you whether they did it AFTER someone else did the hard work of learning it.
I am a bit surprized at all the players rushing back to WoW. I can understand wanting to get the old content in before it is removed (I’m probably going to do this myself), but this expansion is almost certainly 9+ months away. It makes me sad because I had actually planned in advance to spend September in Azeroth before there was any sort of expansion announcement, and now I feel derivative because everyone else has already done it.
Well, we’ll see.
Do you really want your kid growing up, learning how to interact with people via what you hear over voice chat while raiding
Nope, he gets all he needs thanks to that other wonderful invention…TV.
Really, to us it seems silly to hide all things from the child, so that when they become Teenagers, their friends and peers will show them much worse.
I rather they hear it now, and I control what happens, and can let them know that, for example, f*ck is just 4 letters someone decided to put together to make a word…and it has ZERO power and really is just 4 letters.
We have already discussed drugs, sex, and more.
The best news. Since my 10 year old has been playing and MMO, he has done something amazing. He now is reading more (he reads all the quest text in game), and asked for and is reading his first Fantasy novel.
His math skills have gone through the roof (thanks to working on the Trader systems selling gear) and he likes to spend time “planning” now (he actually planned out the specific steps to clean his room this past weekend…with no coercion from the parental units)
Anyways, outside is over rated in my opinion (Serial Killers, Cancer causing sunlight, kidnappers, bugs carrying diseases….)
Kids should be on the computer at max, an hour a day. They have plenty of time to develop a sedentary lifestyle when they get older.
So we can expect soon to be reading posts about Hello Kitty online side by side with posts about EVE – Freaky.
I dunno, HKO is pretty bloody.
Can’t agree with the kids and gaming. My son and nephew both played on school sports teams, were on the honor rolls and played WOW. My son raided during the days of the 40-mans. We had a schedule and rules about how late he could be doing anything, not just gaming. I don’t think he’s any worse for it. As they grew they treated MMOs as something you do when you can’t get to your friends. People like to talk about the “get outside” part of it but how much “get outside” time is there in the average day especially fall and winter depending on where you live? The kids and adults I know that play exchanged MMOs for TV time. They still do all the other things they did in “rl” but don’t want TV hardly at all. Eh fair exchange in my mind.