So welcome or welcome back!

• 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

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.

Standard import from our friends in the Far East. But while some may abhor the microtransaction-based business model of so many of those games, it does allow for the game itself to be both free to play and free to get. Buying stuff is contingent upon enjoying the game, so what's the harm in merely checking it out?

I won't say this is a harbringer of other microtrans games, mostly because the fact they're already coming.

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

Here's something for you MMORPG players out there. This month, an online gamer won a lawsuit worth thousands of dollars against Chinese game operator Shanda. The lawsuit revolved around devalued virtual game equipment and a damaged reputation.

Here's what happened: According to the report, a player of the MMORPG Legend of MIR II earlier this year logged into the game simultaneously from two accounts on the same IP address in order to transfer equipment from his account and another player's.

This prompted the owner of the second account to complain to Shanda, saying that his account had been looted by the first guy. Shanda then proceeded to suspend the account of the the guy accused of virtual theft.

It didn't end there (if it did then we wouldn't have a story at all). The player whose account had been suspended sued Shanda in Hengyang County, and according to the report the lawsuit included "requiring Shanda to unblock his account, and pay compensation of RMB 45,000 (US$ 5,625) for the depreciation of his game equipment during the suspension period, the damage to his character's reputation in the game, and his travel expenses."

The court evaluated the player's equipment through 5173.com and found his claim to have merit. He was awarded compensation of over RMB 30,000 (US$3,750). This decision was handed down on November 15. Shanda has made no comments on the case, and the company has four days left to make an appeal.

The details don't matter to me much really. Like, why would the player who had the second character complain they were looted when it was supposedly the recipient of nice new goods.

But what I do find interesting is that this 5173.com site (which I can't find an English version of) has such clout a judicial body would reference it to track the real world value of a virtual good. And then to actually require the company pay that player back for it.

There's lots of questions and potential ramifications here, but the biggie for me is this:

If an external company can ascribe real world value to a good, and the government validates that, then the control the developer has over that good is reduced. What happens to game balance then? What if an uber sword was deemed too uber and was nerfed? Suppose that sword was already sold to another player? Would that player be able to sue the company for diminishing the value of their purchase because they decided to better balance the game?

What does this do for mudflation? Can that even happen anymore? Or will a good need to stay the same relative value throughout the life of the game?

I am really hoping this is an isolated exception to the general rule, because otherwise there's big trouble ahead.

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.

Gaming is what has been on the rise since the 70s. It's people who want a good time, fun alone or with friends.

Meanwhile, The MMOG genre was growing at a steady clip based mostly on people who wanted a cool online experience, live a virtual life. The advertising of the day speaks volumes for the audience companies were attracting. People were compelled to roleplay in these emerging graphical environments. They could build houses, host vendors, found settlements, all the stuff someone seeking a virtual existence would love.

The steady growth of the genre had this playstyle at its root. Everquest was one of the early departures from this, but even it was the sort of environment in which societies could be born. As has recently come up again here, EQ had the sort of downtime that people simply wanted to fill with conversation. But this was still mostly between people who came here to have a virtual life.

WoW did not go after this audience. That it happened to capture a great deal of them is expected, since the core experience bears more similarities to EQ and other diku-inspired games than not. However, WoW also did what few other MMOs did before it: capture lots of gamers.

Gamers want different things than virtual lifestylers. One need go no further than compare Second Life to Guild Wars to see that difference. One also doesn't need tea leaves to see which crowd is more numerous, and therefore understand why business is leaning towards delivering more online game than online roleplaying game.

Veterans lament the demise of roleplaying. But that happened concurrent to the sheer explosive growth of the genre. That growth has come from attracting gamers, who come with their own expectations, borne of experience in games of other genres. And even the veterans have benefitted, because to deliver against a gamer's expectation, certain elements must be in place:

• Can I get into it right away? None of this nonsense about having to look all over the world for my first quest NPC. No being able to kill oneself by hitting the wrong key with that NPC. No crazy-kludged interface showing me stuff I won't need to worry about for 20 or more hours of game time.
• Does it work? The days of unplayable instability are over. It works or it doesn't and the latter gets roundly villified. And then ignored.
• Am I having fun right away? 20 levels before I can start having fun? 10 levels before my first real ability? No thanks. That may work in some games, but the most obvious examples are either in decline or built for a different culture entirely.
• Am I winning? Gone are the days where twinking has been the only way to achieve good equipment in the first 15 hours of play. The game giveth or the players walketh.
• Are others in my way? Liking other people is very different from wanting them between you and the objective set for you by the game. Unless they are specifically in your way because of objectives set by the game for them (as in, a WoW Battleground), other players in public-space adventure areas can be a huge source of annoyance. Some games try to solve this through crazy contrived systems. Others just put the best content into instantiated zones created just for you or your group.

Notice has been served to the genre by the newcomers who brought games, and gamers, to the fold. That is where the growth was always sitting. Looking back, it's obvious. Lots of money in video games, lots of people buying and playing. Lots of money in MMOGs, but not nearly as many people. I think we finally understand why that was.

And it's about damned time.

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

• 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.

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

From the press release:

WEBZEN Inc. (NASDAQ:WZEN), a leading global online entertainment company, today announced that the company will present a new payment model to its gamers in Korea for its upcoming online video game, "Soul of the Ultimate Nation." The highly anticipated game, which is currently in the open beta phase in Korea, will offer players free basic service in the market with optional in-game items and services offered for nominal fees, also known as micropayments.

How is this "new"? Is it new to Webzen? I would expect most new MMORPGs launching in Korea to be based on micropayments. To me, the question is how long it'll take before they start becoming the standard in the West.

Not that I think the few that are here now are representative of huge hits in North America. Space Cowboy, Archlord, Maplestory and apparently Everquest 2's trade-enabled servers all seem to have not yet gained serious traction in the U.S., or are reporting numbers in ways the usual gentries of aggragated ranting don't pick up upon. Can't blame the punditry of course. Most have been disliking microtransactions/RMTs since the days buying and trading Ultima Online gold was the big thing to hate.

Played this at E3 a bit. Except that you could set some fairly interesting parameters for the instances you enter, it seemed likely a prettier version of Guild Wars. I don't know what their business plan is for North America and Europe. But between the above announcement and their earlier one about partnering with Massive Entertainment to provide ingame advertising, another no-no for the veteran set, I wonder who their target player is going to be in the West.

• 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…