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Lifetime Subscription Realms

Gaming

At launch, I was a big fan of Free Realms.  It was a nice looking, well crafted game, and it was free.  I played it a few hours a week right up until they moved the velvet rope.  Originally, some professions were fully open up to level 20 and other professions were closed unless you paid.  I really liked this because it allowed you to see the game from the bottom to the top, at least in part.  The new model allows you to get up to level 5 in every profession, with further advancement behind the pay wall.  Because of the switch, I quit shortly thereafter, because frankly, even though I was enjoying it, it wasn’t worth $5 a month to play.

Right now and until August 2nd, SOE is running a special, $30 lifetime subscription for Free Realms.  Due to a few freebies and other gifts I’ve gotten over the last year, I had accumulated 2800 Station Cash points, and the store said I could buy the lifetime subscription for 2999 points.  I cracked open the wallet, bought $5 worth of points and bought my lifetime membership.

Sadly, this means that Free Realms technically doesn’t belong in the Freeloading category anymore, so this will be my last post on this game under this heading.

I think the game is totally worth $30.  Especially if you have kids.  Sure, there are still many items in the cash shop, and so your spending days may not be over, but the game will have no fixed costs, which is nice.  And you can always dole out Station Cash as allowance and/or rewards.  Personally, I like the game for the same reason I still like Puzzle Pirates – I like short arcade-style mini-games, but I love that doing them contributes to an overall game and world.  Sure, I could play Bejeweled or other matching games over at Popcap or on Facebook, but they don’t earn me anything.  In Free Realms, when I do well at mining I get ore which I can smith into weapons that I can use in my fighting professions and so on.  Plus, I like running around in huge worlds and seeing stuff.

Now, the only issue I have with Free Realms is their silly 1024 x 768 minimum resolution limitation that prevents me from being able to play on my 1024 x 600 netbook.  Puzzle Pirates is still the winner on that device…

Movie Round-Up: July 16th, 2010

Reviews

Standing Ovation:

If you like those Disney movies about singing kids, you’ll probably like this too, and so will most kids. Of the three opening films this weekend, this is the best one for families.  Not really my cup of tea, though it is highly likely I will see this some day after it shows up on Netflix.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice:

I am a sucker for magic and fantasy.  And despite him being quite awful in a number of films, I always find myself wanting to like anything that Nicolas Cage is in.  The special effects look great, and the trailer has me hooked, and even Mr. Cage appears to not be awful.  If I go to the theater this weekend, it’ll be either to catch up on an older film I missed (damn you free passes that excluded the first couple weeks of release!) or it’ll be to see this movie.

Inception:

But really, the only reason The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is at the top of my list is because I’ve already seen Inception.  I’m going to try do describe this movie without spoiling it.  Have you seen the movie Dreamscape from 1984?  In that film, specially gifted people could enter the dreams of others and try to help them defeat their nightmares.  How about The Cell from 2000?  Here, a woman who enters dreams to help people takes on the task of going into a comatose serial killer to locate his final victim before they die.  Inception has its roots in the same ground.  The mind and dreams are important.  In this case, Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb leads a group of people who are thieves.  They call it extraction.  They enter the mind of a dreamer and get at the secrets he holds.  But they are hired to do something different this time, to plant a new idea into a target’s mind.  The movie is almost two and a half hours long and I’ve just described the first, maybe, twenty minutes, in broad strokes leaving out the juicy details, and that’s all I can really say.  That’s all I want to say, because you must see this movie.  I can’t even tell you why you should see it without spoiling the film.  Visually, the movie is stunning.  It is fabulously paced, and there isn’t a single bad performance by any actor, though in my opinion Joseph Gordon-Levitt came out on top.  Totally worth your hard earned ticket money this weekend.

If you don’t care, why should I?

Random Thoughts

The other day, I went to tour a colocation facility.  For the uninitiated, it’s a place to put your business servers so you don’t have to house them yourself (and maintain UPS and generators and other things like that).  Outside this facility were some protesters.  They had signs about unfair wages and other stuff.  I found out from the employees that the reason for the protest was thus: this company decided to expand, took bids for sheet rock work, and accepted the lower bid, a company with a higher bid didn’t like it and claims the only reason the other bid was lower was because “that company doesn’t pay a fair wage”, but it turns out the upset company is a union shop and likely pays more due to contract not because it’s “fair”.

That’s fine.  I understand, company upset, protests.  But the kicker is, the protesters are not employees of that company or members of that union.  The protesters are homeless people that the company is paying (well below the minimum wage) to stand there 24/7.  I know, I asked, and protesters, when approached, often ask if you know about the protest and offer to give you details, they don’t usually ask for cigarettes and money – homeless people do.

Look.  If you don’t care enough to do your own protesting, then I can’t be bothered to care about your protest.  And the ironic part of paying people an unfair wage to protest unfair wages is not really helping you.

Besides, have you been inside?  Their setup is freakin’ sweet!

Deciphering the Message

Gaming

And the Internet was once again safe!  Blizzard backs down!  But did they?  Let’s take a look at the message and see what it’s really saying:

Hello everyone,

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games.

So far we have a standard greeting and then the first sentence and I’m already going to step in…  Once again, RealID is being framed as a tool to make the game better, which we all know (or should know) by now isn’t the real reason for it.  They want to build a social network they can leverage for advertising, just like everyone else, and clean forums, if that even happened, was just a side effect they trotted out for PR.  If they really desired to make the forums a better place, there are at least a dozen things they could have done other than revealing real names.  This sentence exists to set up the wall they are about to blame you from.

We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

And there it is.  Your feedback, your concerns, our forums, and they’ve decided at this time not to use real names.  Notice the clear marketing speech.  Real Names are still on the table, because that is the ultimate goal.  Our feedback and concerns have simply caused them to adjust the time table.  They’ll come back to real names later, when they’ve thought of a less explosive way to work it in.

It’s important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games.

Again with the framing.  This whole thing is about the forums, right?  Nothing else.  No social network, no advertising money, nothing.  All of this is for YOU, to make the forums awesome for YOU.  Please look at the right hand and ignore what the left one is doing.

We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

See?!?!  Forum stuff!  This was never about anything else, just forum stuff.  Oh, and we decided to implement a unique account ID system that doesn’t reveal your real name, which will give us all the accountability we needed over our current system of letting people troll with any character name they wanted and doesn’t let people find out where you live unless they want to spend a few days or weeks at it instead of 20 minutes.  To me, that someone can find my information on the Internet isn’t an issue, it’s out there, I know that.  To me, it’s a “heat of the moment thing”.  Say I go to the forum and read your post about “The most awesome hunter spec EVAR!!!!” and say, “You are being obtuse.  While this build certainly doesn’t suck, it is also clearly not the best build because it lacks…” and now you are pissed because I called you fat (I didn’t), I would like any revenge you suddenly plan about visiting my house and punching me in the face to show me who’s fat (again, no, obtuse, not obese) to take a while to execute, so that you have a change to realize (and maybe visit dictionary.com) it might not be the best idea (because you are fat, and I’d kick your ass) rather than actually be in your car with the GPS telling you how to get to my house in less than half an hour.

I want to make sure it’s clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II.

Our plans are separate… sure.  Except for the part where they are all tied to the same Real ID and the social network we are building.  The real point of this sentence cannot be fully understood until you read the rest of the paragraph.  So, shall we?

We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you’ll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.

Notice what is missing here?  I’ll give you a hint, it is the focus of this entire uproar.  That’s right, real names.  Yes, the forums won’t display your real name, but in order to use these other features of Real ID you have to have your real name revealed to others.  Maybe I’m an outlier, or maybe a lot of people are too new to MMOs and the concepts of RPGs, but I’ve been part of a community from EverQuest for going on eleven years now.  Originally it was all based around the game server and the IGN/Vault forum for that server, but around 8 years ago we moved off to a privately run message board due to some heavy handed over-moderation.  There are many people in this community I would call my friends.  I would happily use a system with them that allowed for cross-game and cross-realm chat and being able to see all each others characters and for a good sized chunk of those people I don’t know their real names (they could probably find mine, because, you know, my blog isn’t exactly a secret and my name is all over this thing).  We didn’t need real names to build friendships or a community.

Oh, and before I forget, see that last sentence?  Yeah, this isn’t over yet.  Real ID is going to continue to evolve and real names on the forums are being backed off of at this time.

In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters, ( http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/mission.html ) and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard’s success from the beginning.

And in closing, I want to point out that I almost believe him.  Until this move, I totally believed that Blizzard was run by and run for gamers.  They got us.  They delivered games only when they were ready.  But they aren’t alone anymore.  Activision owns them, and Bobby Kotick has said time and time again, he’s not in gaming for the games, he’s in gaming for the money.  The Blizzard that cared, to whom Every Voice Mattered, doesn’t exist anymore.  The honeymoon is over.  Knowing that Real ID is still there, that the social network and partnership with Facebook are still the plan, that real names are only off the table at this time, that’s why I don’t believe him.  This is just an appeal to the past, “Hey, remember when you loved us?  You should still love us!  We haven’t changed!  Except for some stuff, but I assure you, that stuff isn’t what matters.  What matters is that we make good games, and you love our games, and our games will keep being good… even if you have to jump through hoops and become a part of a giant marketing machine and social network to enjoy them.  We promise, it won’t hurt… most of you.  And hey, those are some good odds.”

For me, I’m still out.  Starcraft II pre-order cancelled.  Diablo III pre-order cancelled.  Cataclysm pre-order cancelled.  There is another shoe or two around here, and I’m going to wait for them to drop before I get back in bed with Blizzard.  That said, I’m still a fan of Blizzard at this time.

Movie Round-Up: July 9th, 2010

Reviews

Predators:

I loved the original film.  I loved the sequel.  I even liked the two AvP movies despite their flaws.  This movie just looks like a lot of fun.  I like most of the actors, and Robert Rodriguez and even Nimród Antal.  I’ve already made plans to go see this with a bunch of friends, which is exactly how you should see a movie like this.  I have hopes that this movie will be great, but even if it sucks it will still end up being pretty good, if you know what I mean.

Despicable Me:

I managed to get a pass to a free screening of this movie.  I took the wife and a couple of friends, and we all loved it.  It was fun.  It was heart warming in all the right places.  It had kid humor.  It had jokes for the adults (and better yet, the jokes were subtle enough that your kids won’t be scratching their heads because they don’t get it because they probably won’t even notice them).  But hands down, the minions stole the show.  Those little yellow guys make this movie totally worth the price of admission.  This movie is available in 3D, and we saw it in 3D, but I’d say the 3D isn’t required.  Only a handful of scenes really benefit from it and none of them would hurt if it was gone.  Well, okay, there is one part that is worth the 3D.  When the movie ends, stay, as there are a few scenes sprinkled through the credits, and they abuse the hell out of the 3D.