Site issues

To those who occasionally have been visiting since my last post, I apologize for the site issues of late. Long and short everything is working again.

So welcome or welcome back!

LoTRO Screens

LoTRO on my old PC 

• AMD Athlon 2000xp (1.73gHz)
• 1gb RAM
• Sapphire Radeon 9800pro, 128mb RAM
• SoundBlaster Audigy
• Win XP Pro SP2 

LoTRO on my new PC

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2×2.4GHz)
• 2gb RAM
• nVidia GeForce 8800, 640mb RAM
• SoundBlaster X-Fi
• Win XP Pro SP2

Verbosity restrained

I love writing. That'll come as no shock to anyone with whom I've traveled these spaces with.

I also loved having this blog. It was my own personal outlet, a place I could do with whatever I wanted.

But the time has come to shut it down. I've learned quite a bit from blogging, from web stuff to my own personal preferences. What I've realized is that I'd prefer to be part of a community of conversation than just bark at the world on my own. There's never a want for conversation out there.

I've greatly appreciated the folks who have stopped by to comment on what I've had to say. The beauty is that if you did that, chances are I've seen you somewhere else anyway. So I hope to see you there again

/wave

PS. I've been getting slammed with spambot comments, upwards of 75 a day. Must have hit some critical threshold or something. So I've shut down comment posting as well. If you wish to contact me, please feel free to email me at darniaq@darniaq.com.

Acclaim launches their first MMO

While they previously announced also working on 9Dragons and 2Moon, the first MMO title out of the gate for Acclaim is Bots.

Continue reading Acclaim launches their first MMO…

Player sues MMO… and wins?!

Got this from one of my newsfeeds, but I see Slashdot picked it up as well.

Basically, a player sued an MMO company because their account was banned for long enough that their virtual goods depreciated in real world value.

Continue reading Player sues MMO… and wins?!…

Gamers want games

A few years ago, many in the MMOG community foresaw a fairly steady, but shallow, growth in the overall number of players. There were a lot of reasons for this, from the sheer inability to deliver a game with the same polish and stability as an offline title, to the required internet connection at a time when developers still designed for 56kpbs dialup, to the rather unique nature of the concept itself.

As has been said countless times, World of Warcraft proved us (myself included) wrong. Way wrong.

There's a lot of reasons for this. But chief among them, in my opinion, was because at its heart, it's a game. For gamers.

Continue reading Gamers want games…

Scarce

There's a lot going on, from Curt Schilling's new MMOG development studio, to Raph touching on one of my favorite futurist concepts, to the dupe bug in Second Life. I just haven't had much time to do anything but work and, well, go home and work. It really kinda bites because it's dropped even my gaming time down to nothing, and I just got my hands on NWN2. Forget actually trying to get a PS3 or Wii.

Hopefully things slow down again after Thanksgiving. Until then, game on!

MTV now also an MMO Importer

According to Gamasutra (by way of Raph), the MTV Networks division of Viacom is going to be the North American publisher for Nexon titles, including the following.

• Maplestory (comments)
• Kart Rider
• Audition

I really don't know anything about Audition beyond what Wikipedia had to say, but the first and second are huge.

Snatching these up for North America while pushing ahead with their alternate-demographic virtual lifestyley games shows a rather impressive degree of diversity for a company new to the game space. Whatever audience Viacom can attract to Laguna Beach, VMTV and LogoWorld will likely be additive to whoever they can attract to the above three, which are already very popular.

This is new? S.U.N. and RMTing

As announced yesterday, Webzen, makers of SUN (and other games), will present "a new payment model".

Trouble is, it doesn't sound new at all.

Continue reading This is new? S.U.N. and RMTing…

Updated links, Multiverse beta

Been travelling a few days so have only been able to keep up with comments. Just a few quick updates:

• I updated Links page with a few additions, notably Mike Rozak's MMORPG Dev Kit list, which he referenced in the comment thread about Multiverse at Raph's place.
• Multiverse Client is now available, though you can only move and chat in it (apparently, since I can't get it to work well yet). You'll need to register a free account with a valid email address so you can confirm it.
• I also found a good complementary tool for Babelfish in InterTran. Seems to cover a lot of Eastern European and some Slavic languages that AltaVista's tool does not. The tools at Tranexp are designed for folks who want to add translation services to their site. I might actually do that someday.

And as usual added about ten more games I forgot I had played or have been following. I just scared myself…