Category: Editorials

Lessons From 2013 #12: Announced Too Early


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Developers generally get around to announcing an MMO once it is several years in development. After all, MMOs take a very long time to develop, and are often times at risk of sudden cancellation for one reason or another. In the case of World of Darkness, CCP first announced the MMO way back in 2006 with White Wolf Publishing at Eve Online Fanfest for release in about five or six years. Following a series of layoffs at the team over the past few years, CCP confirmed earlier this year that World of Darkness is still in pre-production and won’t be coming out until 2015 at the earliest.

Just yesterday, CCP once again confirmed layoffs at the World of Darkness development team. The moral of the story? Don’t count your chickens before you have any eggs, or a chicken.

MMOrning Shots: DC Universe


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Today’s MMOrning Shot comes neither in the morning, nor is it funny second thing.

World of Warcraft's Cash Shop Launches


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World of Warcraft’s in-game store has arrived in the form of the Battle.net shop. Right now the cash shop is rather limited, offering access to the standard fluff players have come to know and either love or hate from Blizzard’s web client. Vanity pets run about $10, with mounts at $25, although most items from both sets are 50% off for the time being to celebrate the launch. Grab them before they go back to regular price on January 1st.

(Source: Joystiq)

Lessons From 2013 #10: Something About Hyperbole


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I love my audience, each and every one of you, but let’s be honest: We have a habit of taking jokes out of context when they come from people or organizations that we don’t like. I’m not trying to shame anyone, I fall into that same trap myself from time to time. It’s easy to call someone a liar when they are clearly exaggerating or being facetious.

Still, that didn’t stop people from taking Perfect World Entertainment seriously when they revealed a joke infographic detailing how Neverwinter is actually an annual savings of $25 million USD if you look at it the right way. Or they were just looking for something to complain about. Or they can’t take a joke. Or they have a strange grudge against people they never met who make a game they likely don’t play.

Blade & Soul Making Bank In China


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Blade & Soul may not be coming westward for a while, but gamers in North America and Europe should be relieved to see that the game is performing exceptionally well in China. According to MMO Culture, not only is Blade & Soul on its way to surpassing two hundred servers, fifteen of which were added last week, the game has eighteen million active users. To top things off, the number of concurrent online users surpassed 1.8 million. To put that into perspective, if you took 1.8 million people, all of them would be playing Blade & Soul.

Look forward to Blade & Soul’s spike in revenue on NCSoft’s next quarterly report.

(Source: MMO Culture)

Lessons From 2013 #9: From Failure Comes Greatness


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Storybricks has become my new grammar peeve for this year. When people refer to the cancelled story-building MMO, they are thinking of the Kingdom of Default project. Storybricks, unless I have read the whole ordeal wrong, refers to the platform through which the AI is given its behaviors. Who could have thought that after Storybricks had its rather disastrous Kickstarter campaign, that the next announcement would be partnering with a major game studio? Yes, Storybricks as a product on its own may not have drawn cash from Kickstarter, but it was certainly promising enough for Sony Online Entertainment to take notice.

Hopefully this will be a success story worth talking about when Everquest Next hits next year.

NSA Infiltrates World of Warcraft


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Terrorist hunting or just looking for a reason to play World of Warcraft at the taxpayer’s expense? According to documents leaked to The Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency and British Government Communications Headquarters deployed spies into multiple MMOs including World of Warcraft. The practice, dating back to 2008, monitors game communities on the grounds that terrorists may be using chat channels to plot activities. Terrorist activities of a terroristic nature, no doubt.

In addition to World of Warcraft, the agencies have also targeted Second Life and Xbox Live services. The documents don’t provide much evidence that the services are actually being used for terrorist activity.

(Source: The Guardian)

MMOrning Shots: Go To Hell


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Today’s MMOrning Shot is a very old screenshot from Hellgate: London, circa 2005. I could be wrong, but I’m not entirely sure that the demon pictured above ever made it into the final game. Is Hellgate even running anymore? The website says yes but the forums appear to be offline constantly.

Check out MMOrning Shots every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Lessons From 2013 #8: Giving Purpose To Planetside


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As fun as it was, Planetside 2 launched without a whole lot of direction. The lack of a lattice system similar to the original Planetside meant that planetary combat was chaotic, with many players simply base jumping by seeking out areas most likely to be empty and therefore captured without resistance. With update 9, Sony Online Entertainment introduced a lattice system, requiring the forward bases be captured in order for more territory to be captured.

The lesson here is that if you’re going to make a sequel, pay attention to what made the original work and have it in at launch rather than months later.

Extra lesson: I need a new Planetside 2 stock photo. This one predates launch.

Lessons From 2013 #7: Taking Threats Seriously


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Am I the only one who has noticed that stupid people have a habit of doing stupid things? Case in point? Back in 2007, teenagers on Long Island started a fad of running into fences to knock them over. Every once in a while you hear on the news that someone called a bomb threat to a school or business as a joke. Stupid? Yes. Dangerous? Maybe. Liable to ruin your future? Absolutely.

Earlier this year, a gamer in RuneScape learned just that lesson when police showed up at his house to arrest him over a threat made in-game. In addition to multiple anti-Semitic comments, Thomas Frongillo reportedly also said “I’m shooting up my school tomorrow.” Frongillo was arrested and charged with threatening to commit a crime and threatening a bombing or hijacking. He contested that it was just a harmless jest.

The moral of the story is nothing. The people who need to be told that saying “I’m going to shoot up my school” is a stupid idea aren’t going to pay attention anyway.