Friday, July 30

Wot he said!

Some posts that make my point better than I could:

Scott Jennings summarizes the even more unusual than usual happenings to Second Life.
Personally I do think that if your user base en masse prefers to use a third party viewer in stead of your shiny new 2.0 thing, it's time for self reflection. Scott shows a couple of good insights.

Another Scott, over at Pumping Irony, perfectly phrases the disappointment I too feel regarding the Guild Wars 2 Levels. I liked the skill based "potentially equally powerful" 20 levels of Guild Wars... Why 80 levels? Why not 100? ArenaNet which formed from people having a good idea that the rest of Blizzard didn't like for their WOW-thing project are now firmly on the playing it safe, conformists side.

Gordon form "We fly Spitfires" explains the decepitve rip-off that is the new EverQuest 2 model way better than I could. All I have to add is that I'm not sure making a subscription based MMO F2P later on is the way to go. It becomes a process of taking things away rather than adding them. I.e. these schemes tend to be created by looking at a feature list of the subscription game, then take stuff out for the F2P version(s). Turbine does it better than SOE though.

Pornokitch gives one of the best ever, not to mention incredibly funny, disections of all that's wrong with Wizard's First Rule. A book I'm sad to say I've read and actually I kept with the series for about 6 more books. Then I had enough of Kahlan getting raped every book as well as each solution being the cause of the central problem for the next book and this somehow being the fault of the main characters even though they had no way of knowing. It's so bad an MMO must be in the works somewhere.

2 comments:

  1. Right from the moment we heard it I've been dissapointed with GW2 and their decision to have an increased level cap, I can understand why they would want to appease the players that need that 'ding' but GW worked so well without it, they sold 6 milion units, it obviously didn't hinder the game that much, it seems like a backwards step.


    Wow didn't look that closely at the EQ2 options, guess SOE aren't fussed by the negative images they already had...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am quite happy now I have never read any of the Terry Goodkind's books. I did see two episodes of it on TV while in Chicago so I know what he was talking about. A brilliant review!

    The EQ2 deal is plain daft. SOE will figure this out the hard way when money doesn't roll in. I don't really understand how some of those people think. But in the end they think they will make more money this way. No other reason to do it. Bloggers and potential players can shout foul, but in the end it is business as usual.

    SOE is not out to chase people away. They want their money. If it doesn't come they will change. In the meantime I will spend the same amount of money and time on EQ2 as before.

    I did renew my Vanguard subscription last month. Walked around for 5 minutes, realized I didn't want to be there, and cancelled it. Pretty daft move on my end.

    COH has 50 levels and it actually doesn't matter at all anymore there. It is about gaining the powers. The levels are just numbers. From what I have read so far GW2 does it somewhat similar. Level 80 is not going to be a big deal. I haven't played GW enough to really know the joy of it, but personally I like the idea of relatively short lived characters. If I walked through the world in two months, and I am level 80 I can retire and start over. The collecting of all titles, badges, armor, etc is a bit lost on me.

    Perhaps the cap is made for people like me. As long as I can play always play with my friends regardless of their level I think it is great! If the level cap really causes me to be left out than GW2 really screwed up. For now I am happy with it.

    The SL article was a bit tl;dr for now :)

    ReplyDelete