It’s spring cleaning time again here at MMO Fallout, and I still have over 130 never-been-published drafts to go through.
- Jagex Doesn’t Understand Economics. (2010)
The economy of Runescape is delicate like a flower. No, a better analogy would be a kitten perched on a clothesline above a pot of boiling water that happens to be sporting a grease-fire. Everyone wants to pet the kitten, but all it takes is one careless player, one clan with greedy intentions, or one developer with no foresight or training in economics, and suddenly we find ourselves wondering if kitty was fried before he was boiled, or the other way around.
For those that haven’t figured out, I canned this article for being a little too aggressive. I still stand by the point of the article, and may bring it back in a more fact-oriented manner, but the essential information of the article was so: Jagex’s economy can be fixed by removing the high-alchemy spell from the magic book. High-alchemy is a spell that generates massive amounts of wealth out of garbage that couldn’t be sold in such high quantity, at a price higher than selling to an NPC vendor.
- Cheating For The Fun Of It: RuneScape Style
I’m going to infuriate a lot of people when I say this, but I’m very tempted to start botting in Runescape. I would do it on an alternate account, of course, whose membership I would pay for with a game time card just in case Jagex tried to link my two accounts to each other. I wouldn’t sully my actual account by cheating on it, as my ethics tell me not to cheat to gain a competitive advantage, and I wouldn’t use it to get easy high levels. In fact, I’m aiming to get very low levels.
The word count for this article, I kid you not: Exactly 666. Now this article was based off of reports at the time that players were being rolled back for botting without having certain items taken away while equipped. So it was possible to bot one’s way to 99 in a skill, obtain the skill cape, be reset to level 10 and still be wearing the cape. Now, I referred to this as making a penalty for cheating into a symbol of status, and I cut it (to the best of my memory) because it came off as far less satire and far more “material that would get me blacklisted by any self-respecting developer.”
- Manage Your Lives: A Public Service Announcement (2010)
Everyone has frustration and anxiety, and take it from me when I say you should go to everyone who advises you to bottle it up, and explain to them exactly where they can shove their wisdom. Venting your frustrations, even if you have no audience, is healthy. The last thing you want to do is hold it in and ignore it, and hope that everything will just get better over time, because it doesn’t. Things don’t just get better because you hope they do, you have to take action, and possibly kick a few asses in the process (not literally).
This article I wrote out in its entirety and then scrapped, because it wasn’t as much for my audience as it was for me. I wrote this during an extremely stressful point in my life, and upon reflection it revealed a lot of personal details that I would rather not share.
- There’s a Name For MMOs Without Grind (2010)
I often see people complaining about grind in MMOs, generally that they want less grind, or in some instances no grind at all. Now, there is a name for MMOs with no grind: Dead. Offline, shut down, bankrupt, kaput, I could go on all day. Despite what you may be lead to believe, grind is an integral part to keeping an MMO alive in the long run, and it is a feature that isn’t going anywhere for the time being.
This one never made it to publication because it was beating a dead horse. The idea of complaining over grind in an MMO is absurd, because those same people given their wish will complain that the game is a “race to end-game,” and quit just as fast.
- The Term MMO Has Been Diluted (2011)
Among my feedback, I get a lot of requests to de-list games like Crimecraft, Neverwinter, and Global Agenda that are technically not MMOs, and the more this website evolves and “real” MMOs are being added in, the harder the list is becoming to maintain, and the less excuses I can come up with to keep the games listed. Given recent announcements, I have decided to de-list Call of Duty Online, but I wanted to expand upon the idea of MMOs from concept to implementation.
This article was the most disappointing to me, partially because I set out to form a line that ultimately came down to “because they said so.” I want to revisit this article at some point in the future.
MMO Fallout 