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Subscription versus RMT

Gaming

Search around the gaming blogs and you’ll probably find out the opinions of everyone weighing in on SOE putting RMT in the form of their new Station Cash into EQ and EQII.  There have also been announcements that the new Star Wars MMO from Bioware might be a free-to-play/RMT model game.  And SOE does have FreeRealms and The Agency coming.

To be honest… I really don’t care overly much.  About the only problem I have with the whole thing is that I find it weird when a game offers both on the same server.  EQ and EQII both still have a monthly fee that you have to pay to play the game, and now on top of that there is the Station Cash which allows you to buy weapons and armor (nothing great, but definitely a leg up from starting with nothing if you are willing to pay the $10 for it rather than get gear as you play), and experience point bonus potions (where you get use it and for the next 4 or 2 hours you get a 10%, 25% or 50% bonus to your exp earning, again nothing great, but would help you out if you’d rather spend the cash than the time it would take to grind out that exp on your own).  It will be interesting to see where they take it, how much of what kind of items they end up putting on the market, and how much profit they derive from it.  And of course, if they release an expansion that increases the level cap, now that they sell exp bonus potions for cash, will they be inclined to increase the experience curve in new levels making people desire the potions more?  If that is the route they end up going, that’s where I find the problem of using both payments in one game.  So now I am paying my $15 a month to get a game designed to make me want to pay more money…  seems underhanded, if that is the direction this goes.  But for now, its all a “wait and see”.

Another reason I don’t care about which payment model they follow is that neither subscriptions nor microtransactions address the problems that I have with most MMOs.  Let’s take Warhammer Online for example.  I really wanted to play this game, and on some level I still do.  I haven’t played it since beta because my contract job ended and I am out of work.  Its hard to justify paying for a game box and then a monthly fee when I need to be saving every penny until I find work again.  (I am just about the unluckiest person when it comes to unemployment… contract ends right as the economy goes to shit… the last time I was unemployed was in 2001… you remember 2001, right?  That was when the tech field kinda collapsed a bit and then terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center… so, I’m unemployed, sell your stocks and don’t visit any targets of opportunity.)  If I were to play Warhammer Online, sadly, I could only play with half of the people I want to play with.  A bunch of gaming bloggers and readers made up a group called the Casualties of War and picked one server.  I tried to steer my old EQ friends on to the same server, but they ended up somewhere else.  Unfortunately, these two servers were not merged.  So, if I did buy the game, I’d have to pick one group of friends over the other.  This has pretty much been true of every MMO to come out since EQ.  Even with EQ, while I started out on E’Ci with my local friends when I started a new job and found out a couple of people there played EQ too, they were on another server.  Sure, we could still share stories about the game and talk about stuff, but we could never play together… and even more odd, the two servers in question had totally different communities: for example, on E’Ci, player item auctioning was done in the East Commonlands tunnel; on the other server, Greater Faydark.  One server was fairly decent about setting up a raid calendar and people trying not to close people out of content, the other was totally free-for-all.  And while it was interesting to be able to talk about and compare how two groups of people played the same game completely differently, it was overshadowed by not being able to play together without paying fees, leaving behind friends, or playing on two servers (which given the “effort” required to level and raid in EQ, playing on two servers was kind of insane unless you were only serious about one of them).

These days, when a new MMO is launching, I don’t even bother to ask if its a subscription game or a micro transaction game… the first question I always ask is “How many servers do they have?”

Dead Beat

Reviews

Another Dresden book, and another good read.  This time the wizard takes on necromancers in Dead Beat.

I could go on gushing about the book, but if you read my blog you know that I love them.  I will admit that I enjoyed Jim Butcher’s take on necromancy and raising the dead.  It was new to me, the concept of having a “drummer” who keeps the beat that allows the dead to stay under the control of the necromancer.  Very interesting.

Anyway, I do look forward to reading the next book given all the events of this one…  🙂

Concluding the WriMo

Writing

I didn’t win.  I ran into a few obstacles this year.  I fell into the switching stories trap.  I also got sick… nasty stuff.  And I also suffered from a general unemployment malaise.  You know, you would think that with all this free time I’d get plenty of writing done.  But it turns out then when I’m unemployed I spend all my time looking for a new job and worrying I won’t be able to pay my bills.

Anyway… I did manage to get further than I ever have before.  I got just over ten thousand words on one project and probably twenty thousand across all of them.  I’ve never cleared ten thousand before.  So, even though I didn’t win, I managed a milestone.

But now it is December, and the NaNoWriMo is done.  However, I don’t think I’ll stop writing this time.  I’m going to try to block out at least an hour every day for working on something, and I’ll even try to make it the same something as often as possible.

Left 4 Mods

Gaming

Lately, I’ve been down on PC games.  Playing stuff on my Xbox 360 is just easier.  I don’t have to worry about if my graphics card is going to be good enough or if I have enough RAM or a fast enough processor, I just put in the disc and play.  And when I get a job, or when Christmas rolls around, I’ll be getting Left 4 Dead for the 360.  However, the PC does have one advantage, and that is mods.

Being like every other First Person Shooter that has come before it, Left 4 Dead will allow people to make their own maps and their own custom modified rules.  And, just like every other First Person Shooter that has come before it, 99% of those maps and mods will be crappy.  For every awesome map that comes out, there will be at least a couple dozen that play for shit and cause the server to clear when it comes up in the rotation.  And for every incredible mod that comes out, there will be a couple dozen retarded super sniper invisible wall hack cheater mobs where the rules their designers came up with don’t make the game more fun they just allow you to more easily annoy other people.  However, eventually, like every game before it, the maps and mods will settle down.  The crap will get flushed and the best maps and mods will becomes standards.

Lets just hope that after having two games, Half-Life and Half-Life 2, which had a number of very nice maps and mods done for them, Valve thought ahead about how to deliver that sort of content to the console.  It would be nice if in a couple of months they had made deals with a number of map developers out there and put up a Community Map Pack in the Marketplace at 800 points, or something like that.  Or new mods for the game, available for 1600 points.  That would be something… especially when there is someone out there making the entire Crossroads Mall from the remake of Dawn of the Dead:

A man can dream…

The Living Dead

Reviews

In time for the Halloween season, I picked up a collection of zombie short stories called The Living Dead.

One thing I have learned over the years running into zombie fans on the internet and out in the world is that everyone has their favorites.  Some like the slow Romero zombies (my personal favorite), others like the fast running Dawn of the Dead remake style, while still others prefer the hoodoo voodoo zombies, and there are many more flavors.  This collection of short stories pretty much covers them all.  From the cursed living who return from the dead to the mindless drones and even to actors playing extras in Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead at the mall.

Because of this wide range of coverage, I can’t say I loved every story.  In fact, I’d probably say I only loved maybe a third of them, possibly less.  Some of them I could barely trudge my way through, so alien were the concepts of zombies envisioned by their authors (hence the reason why it took me well over a month to read the whole thing).  But, it did make me realize how wide the idea of “zombies” can run, and that perhaps the ideas I’ve been nurturing are not as common as I thought they were.

When I closed the cover of this tome, I was relieved to finally be done what, in part at least, had been a chore to get through.  But I was also satisfied, and really, what more can you ask of a book than that?

The Awesomest Story Ever Told

Writing

That is the title of my NaNoWriMo project this year.  Originally I was going to work on something called Necromancer, but I stalled out on it really early on and after a few days being totally stuck I decided to bail on it in favor of something that will be far easier to write.

So, what is The Awesomest Story Ever Told?  It is the tale of a clan of ninjas who protect the world from threats of the undead who encounter a spaceship from the future crewed by two astronauts, a monkey and a robot who have traveled back in time to prevent a zombie apocalypse.  Right away they discover that the apocalypse of the future was the product of a group of mad scientists who unleashed the zombie hordes in their bid to overthrow all the governments of the world.  As the scientists activate their own time machine and slip away, our heroes reconfigure the spaceship from the future to follow them.  It is a journey through history fighting for the future and encountering everything awesome that has ever existed.

As you can see, my basic story already contains much awesome.  Ninjas, zombies, astronauts, a monkey, a robot, mad scientists, spaceships and time travel.  There are already plot points to include dinosaurs, cavement, pirates, wild west gunfighters, sharks, vampires, werewolves, a medieval castle and knights, but this story needs to include all of the awesome.  All of it.

So, I implore you, every reader, suggest something (or many things) that is awesome.  Feel free to explain why it is awesome, or don’t.  Just suggest awesome and I will try to work it in to the story, and I’ll give credit to the first person to suggest an item of awesome should this work ever see publication of any form.

The PBBG

Gaming

It stands for Persistant Browser Based Game.  To be honest, until recently, I didn’t know this term existed.  But then, that itself is the point of The PBBG Project.  To get the term out there.  And considering that a PBBG is the kind of game that I want to make someday, I want to do what I can to help out.

In September, for my 30 Days of Game post I reviewed Travian…  October turned into a mess as I became unemployed and also because I picked a horrible game to review.  I won’t even bother to name it since I don’t think I can review it properly since I barely played it and hated every minute that I did.  In the future, I’ll be picking my games to play and review from the PBBG Project website.

Anyway, October didn’t work out, and November is pretty well shot… so here’s looking toward December…

Doing My Part

Random Thoughts

Today I loaded up the car with all the things I’ll never sell at my garage sales: 3 monitors, 2 printers, and 2 scanners.  They were all old.  The monitors were not LCD or Plasma, they are 15″ and 17″ tubes.  The printers were an old EPSON and an HP, both with printing speeds of about 1 page per minute, and requiring old ink cartridges that are getting harder and harder to find.  The scanners ran about a page a minute as well… or rather a page every two minutes since they don’t have feeders and you have to manually change pages.  They all functioned, however, and so I was loathe to just throw them away and have them wind up in a landfill.  Most places won’t take them for free, asking you to pay anywhere from five to twenty-five dollars per item to “recycle” electronics, though I suspect many places are just taking the money to offset the cost of landfilling the items and make a little profit to boot.

But today I took my treasure trove of unwanted goods to a local place that was running a one day collection of small electronics.  They were sorting them, palleting them and trundling them off for donation and auction.  In other words, asking for your old junk that someone else might want and trying to keep them out of the landfill if they can.

So, feeling pretty good about clearing out a good bit of storage space without dropping it into a dumpster, I decided that I should blog today and once again pimp out GreenDimes and urge people to do their part to eliminate waste.

Back when I lived in an apartment complex, they would keep trash cans next to the mailboxes specifically for people to dump their junk mail into.  It would be overflowing in a couple of days, often just after one.  So much unwanted crap gets mailed to people, and it just goes in the garbage.  When I bought my own house, in only took a month or two for the junk mailers to find me.  Soon I was bringing in an armload of mail each day, of which maybe one or two items a day were actually anything I wanted to see.  At first I decided to try to fight the glut myself.  I called the companies, who would direct me to other companies, who would promise me I was being removed.  For the first year, I fought the good fight, but I was losing.  The mail didn’t stop.

Then I found GreenDimes.  It was recommended to me by a friend, and I figured that twenty bucks was worth giving it a shot.  I am so supremely happy with the service, that I highly recommend it to everyone.  They have been far more successful at getting me (and the previous owners of my house) removed from mailing lists, and that combined with my switching to paying all of my bills online, I actually get no mail at all a few days each week now.  I still do get a few local mailers, and I even use them… see, when I get mailers or coupons once or twice a week, I actually read them, unlike when I was getting eight to ten a day and would put them straight into the recycle bin or trash can.

Sure, some people might argue that I am missing out on things by not getting junk mail… but seriously, we call it junk mail for a reason.  Arguing in favor of junk mail is like arguing in favor of email spam.  Does anyone actually think email spam is a good thing?

Anyway, overall cutting out the junk makes me feel good, and I would highly recommend it to everyone.

One World

Gaming

After watching the blogging storm over the problems and successes of Warhammer, I am again certain that one of the major advancements in traditional MMOs that can’t come too soon is that of getting every player on to one single world server.

If nothing else, I think games should have one single master account server and then run the entire game as instances of areas instead of separate world servers.  Warhammer, in my opinion, exemplifies exactly why this is needed.  The game, while maintaining a decent level of PvE style game play, is focused on PvP style game play.  When players are the content, you have to give the players every possible tool to solve their own problems.  And the biggest problem in PvP is population and imbalance.

When playing the game requires not only for you to have a dozen players on your team but also a dozen players on the other team, in the same place, at the same time, it is completely unfun to be on a server where you always have a dozen people and the other side never does.  Even more so when you hear that another server is having the exact same problem, but diametrically opposed: they always have a dozen on the side your server lacks, and never have anyone on your side.

I admit, the first time I logged in to City of Heroes on a stress test day in beta and saw 12 of the same city zone instance, I didn’t like it.  Grouping up and then trying to get everyone in the same instance was a pain in the ass.  Of course, I believe they have overcome much of that now.  It can’t really be that hard anyway… if you are in the same zone but a different instance that your group leader, all the players need is a “Join Leader” option that will zone them to the proper instance, or display a message if the action can’t be performed (like if the instance is already at the hard cap for player totals).  But seeing games that want PvP elements having to struggle because they have erected an iron wall between their players makes me realize that instancing can actually be a better solution.

I’m still against the idea of overly instancing PvE content, letting players go off into their own private areas and hide from the world, but I definitely think instancing in some overarching way is going to be the solution for PvP content.  Give the players the ability to solve their own problems… one that doesn’t include “start a new character on another server” and one that doesn’t require you, the developer, to write exception code to force some sort of cross server matching like WoW has done.  Sure, it fixed some of the queue issues, but you still end up playing against people that ultimately are not part of your server community.

One World.  I think its a design well worth pursuing, and in some cases is absolutely needed.