I hope that image didn’t burn your eyes out. I am wearing sunglasses. As mentioned I am back playing WoW. My year long hiatus from the game (despite a brief respite to check out the DK starting area) while mucking around in various other MMO’s and SP games wasn’t ended because I missed the game…
All posts in MMO
Six Shooter Screenshots are Serious Business
Tagged by good friend Tesh over at Tish Tosh Tesh, us periphery folks are now part of the fun. Like Tesh, I’m not going to follow the format as directly. Unlike Tesh, I don’t keep a lot of my screenshots so finding any was quite the effort. I have two problems with screenshots – I…
My Favorite Fantasy Classes
This is a fluff post. Nothing to do with game design but I was just reminiscing about my different character classes over the years and which ones stood out. It is in chronological order, not ranked by preference.
Introduce a New Phase in the Development Cycle
Zubon over at Kill Ten Rats made a generic post that is an ultimate truth with MMOs. We all accept and are resigned to the fact that when an MMO launches it will be incomplete and buggy, and we will have to fight through the launch of a game with Rose Coloured Glasses until such…
Cable Subscription VS MMO Subscription – Death Match!
Often I read people critical of the MMO subscription model on blogs and forums, and inevitably someone will chime in with the counterargument “I pay for my cable every month, and I don’t complain if I don’t watch that much tv”. The similarity of course is that both are a flat monthly fee for unlimited…
Image Motivation
I was reading an interesting article called “Doing good or doing well? Image motivation and monetary incentives in behaving prosocially”, which is basically a study by some prominent economists to understand what motivates people to invest time or money in charity work. The basic premise is that people do it to improve their image –…
Numbers Can Fool Us
Is WoW really a cultural phenomenon? Many people think so, spurting the “11.5 million subscriber mark“. Where does that number come from? I found it interesting that Blizzard stopped releasing where the subscribers came from in that press release. When Blizzard announced they hit 10 million, they clearly stated 2M from Europe, 2.5M from North America,…
Missed Marketing Opportunity – Take 2
I had a birthday over the weekend. Actually scaled back working a bit to enjoy it, and what was planned as a nice quiet dinner out with my wife, followed by some quality couch time (with our little one spending the night at Nana’s) turned out to be a full blown surprise party. It was…
Greatest Fantasy Movie Ever
The camera pans from a burning torch, and settles in on a group of weary adventurers. Their swords blood-stained, their armor indented with sword swings from fallen foes. Zoom in on a Dwarven Warrior wiping his blade. “Okay. In the next room lies Grinto, the evil giant. We must be well prepared as he is…
WAR Population Stats
Wow, just WOW! (About WAR though, not WoW.) Just found this post about Warhammer Online’s faction population balance. The crux of it?  Average of All North American Servers   Active Accounts Per Faction: 49% / 51% Relative Average Exp. Earning Rate per Time Unit: 50% / 50% Relative Average RP Earning Rate per Time…
Free Trials
The good Cap’n John shared his experience about taking a free trial in WoWÂ and it made me think about my own trials and tribulations in the “free” realm. I do them often. Welcome back weekends I boot up old characters, muck around for a few hours. Friends send me buddy keys to try something out…
Non-Epic Fail, Content, and RMT – Oh My!
Last post I talked about having a peek at LOTRO again, the current darling of blognation. I was drawn to give it a shot because of the handy dandy free trial after their new expansion, Mines of Moira. I had no delusions of grandeur of seeing the new content, but rather was curious of the…
LOTRO – Worth a Second Look?
I had purchased the game when first released and played up to level 10ish but was immediately sucked back into WoW with the Burning Crusade expansion (I was a GM of a progression guild at the time. No time for two games!). Going through some old emails I found an old buddy key I had…
KOTOR – A New Hope
I have bandied about my reservations on KOTOR MMO if it would be a subscription based platform, and took time to praise how it could be wonderful on the RMT platform, but actually haven’t discussed the game itself. How could I? There isn’t much known, afterall, and I refuse to get into speculation such as…
SWKOTORO – On the Defensive?
When I first read the Bioware’s Star Wars MMO based in the KOTOR universe (my apologies for making up yet another acronym for it) was going to be micro-transaction based – I rejoiced. I am still in rejoice mode. Doing the math, I spent about $1000 on WoW, between two accounts, two expansions, sub fees,…
I’ll Take an Effexor Cocktail to Go Please.
Sheesh, where did the week go? It CAN’T be Friday already. I haven’t even started my week yet. I barely gamed all week, dabbling a bit in WoW, spent some good time in L4D, and attempted to workaround my Bioshock/Vista issue. Bioshock 2 – you will not be purchased. There are over 3000 replies on…
Monday Mourning – Nov 17, 2008
To be honest I don’t get what most people hate about Monday mornings. I tend to work weekends, so there is definitely no rest for the wicked at ihaspc. My to-do list on Mondays is as long as any other day but I tend to ease into everyone else’s typical work week – check blogs,…
Epic Win, Epic Fail.
Alternative title: So close yet so far. I finally got by the WoW queue on my server and was able to experience the Death Knight class. The hour and a half quest chain in the Death Knight area was without a doubt one of the best Blizzard gaming I have ever enjoyed. The quests were…
Models Needed!
I have a dirty little secret – I freelance some articles for a PC magazine (nothing cutting edge like, uhm, this blog or anything, but class and levelling guides and the like). I will write a different post about that experience as it has been fun and interesting at the same time. But for now,…
WoW has Two Tier Health Care
You need treatment. You can wait two hours for a doctor to see you, or move to a low population hospital for free, where you were certainly see a doctor and get treated much faster on a more regular basis. The free ambulance ride to the other hospital takes 24 hours. If you pay us $25…
Blizzard to get Bailout Package!
Sorry, working on my Fox News type headlines. With all the fun stuff going on in the markets, it’s nice to see the US banks getting a 700 Billion bailout package while continuing to freeze credit lines and stop lending credit altogether. It’s a good thing these guys didn’t help create their own situation with…
Random Post
Haven’t been updating as much this week as I have been doing crazy other stuff. Playing games. I have been moonlighting in Fallout 3, the L4D demo was released for preorder customers yesterday, and I have still been trying to re-find a comfort level with WoW. Some general thoughts about the three in this random…
My 3rd day of 10 Free in WoW
I had originally only planned to kill 10.
Calling on Copernicus
I made a bold prediction to a friend at the end of the Warhammer Beta that by the end of the first year they would have 1,000,000 subscriptions. I still have a level of confidence in that if they make some moves and continue to improve the game. Notice I said ‘a level’. Now that…
Familiarity Breeds Contempt
I am enjoying WAR. It hasn’t quite turned out the way I had supposed originally (or even beta tested) but it has enough good to stick around for a while to see how it all turns out. This little piece is going to comment on where I think WAR went wrong, but not in any…