Category: MMO

Doctorow’s For The Win is full of fun ideas

Posted on by Nimgimli

I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s For The Win last night. I wanted to talk a little bit about it, because Doctorow has some ideas about the future of MMO gaming that I found pretty interesting.

If you haven’t heard of it, For The Win is a book about a group of gold farmers and other young people fighting to bring about better working conditions for themselves, and for other ‘invisible’ workers who’re treated terribly and work for tiny wages (notably Chinese factory workers). The book couldn’t be more timely with all the Foxconn suicides in the news these days.

The plot of the book itself was ok, but it wasn’t what had me turning pages. What I was really enjoying was glimpsing the future through Doctorow’s eyes. If a specific date for the happenings in the book was mentioned I missed it, but World of Warcraft is considered ancient history (as described by the ~20 year old characters) so I’m going to guess the year is 2025 or thereabouts. Also a lot of the book takes place in Mumbai & Shenzhen, two places which would be totally foreign to me today, being an untraveled Westerner.

So there are a lot of MMOs running in this future world. Four are mentioned often. One is Mushroom Kingdom, run by Nintendo. The other three are all run by Coca-Cola! Implied but not seen are other games run by companies that we don’t think of as gaming companies today. In the future, as now, gold farming isn’t legal, but there isn’t a lot the companies can do to stop it. There are “Pinkertons” running around in games to kill gold farmers (all worlds seem to be full PvP in the future) but they aren’t paid by the companies normally.

In this way For The Win feels a bit retro. Reminded me of Ultima Online with the PKK guilds trying to maintain order.

Most of the gold farmers work for mobsters stationed in India, China or Indonesia. Farming is big business and the games have gotten so big that there are people who really know nothing about the games but who make a living out of investing in virtual goods. The bosses drive their workers relentlessly at times when a particular item is selling for a lot.

Anyway, it’s a fun read, my biggest problem with it is that it makes gold farming sound fun (I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek). These gold farmers don’t stand around in a field alone killing trash mobs over and over. Instead they farm instances, both for the gold and for items. Generally they work in a PC bang together, shouting back and forth between terminals. They tend to be very good players rather than the rather mindless semi-bots that our real gold farmers seem to be today.

So let’s get to some of the ideas I thought were interesting. First, one of the games is called Zombie Mecha (Mecha Zombie??). In it, players pilot giant robots in a post-zombie apocalypse world. It’s a full-on PVP world with two rival factions, plus the zombies who’re AI controlled. Zombies can’t generally hurt someone in a mech unless it gets damaged or stuck, then they swarm all over it. Tales of battle in Zombie Mecha were really fun and I found myself wanting to play that game!

Second, the games are a lot more ‘complete’ than today’s games are. Most things in-world can be interacted with. Of course the programmers can’t think of everything, so when a player tries to perform an action that there’s no scripting for, the game pulls in a Mechanical Turk to take over. These turks are players who get paid a few cents per interaction. They generally run a bunch of sessions at a time so they’re able to juggle interacting with a bunch of players all at the same time.

I think this is a brilliant idea and one game companies need to incorporate asap. It needn’t be as elaborate as in the book, but imagine if every 50th orc you fought was actually being controlled by a person? How much more interesting could the game become? The person running the orc would have a goal of providing you with an immersive experience, not necessarily beating you. You get a better experience so you keep playing, and someone can make a few dollars while they’re hanging out at home playing games.

The next idea is a technology one. When Coke (in the game) is ready to roll out a new server cluster, they build it in a shipping container. They burn it in at their HQ, then ship it to somewhere very cold, and preferably somewhere near a renewable energy source, like a wind farm or a geo-thermal vent. By using the ambient environment to keep the servers cool, they save a lot of money (and energy). Every so often they rotate out one of these containers to bring it back to HQ for refurbing. This might seem trivial if you’ve never been in a big data center but trust me, those places spend a LOT of money and energy on air conditioning.

I had some more examples but this has run long enough for now. You can download a free electronic copy of For The Win if you don’t feel like paying for it. You might encounter some typos and such, but the (ePub) version I picked was very readable; it isn’t like it’s a first draft or anything.

If you’re an MMO player, you’ll probably get a kick out of the gaming aspects of the book. If you’re concerned about worker’s rights in Asia, then I think you’ll find the tale inspiring. Well worth a read.

A farewell to LOTRO, and other musings

Posted on by Nimgimli

I took some time tonight to pack up my housing items in LOTRO. It’s silly for me to log in every 5 or so weeks to pay 55 silver/week rent to keep the house. I just don’t have time to play MMOs anymore, and don’t see that changing while I’m working two jobs. I have a Lifetime sub to LOTRO so I can still pop in and dabble when I do find a few spare minutes, but for now it’s a game, not a world. I don’t need a house in a game. I need houses in worlds.

I have to confess, it all felt really melancholy. I miss the days of escaping to another world, a virtual world. But those days have passed me by in a number of ways. There’s my personal situation: no time and all that. But today’s MMOs just seem to be games and not worlds. EVE is the only exception that I really know about, and damn would I love to have the free time needed to play EVE seriously.

Packing up my LOTRO house had me thinking back to our guild halls and my houses in Ultima Online. That was a real world, at least to me and my guildies. There was a society in that game. There were good people and bad people. There was a dynamic economy. Towns sprang up and faded away over time. Inns would appear and be the ‘in’ (ha! See what I did there?) place to hang out for a while, until they went out of fashion and some new place sprang up.

We’d hang out, throw parties, do battle, make alliances, corner markets, have weddings… we did all kinds of things back then. It was more than a game, it was a place.

Back then, cyberspace was coming, and my then-girlfriend and I would kid about being an elderly couple sitting on the front porch in rocking chairs, jacked in via implants. But cyberspace fizzled, the same way virtual reality and the space program did. Cyberspace seemed like it’d become a place. But that never happened and now the very term seems silly.

I also saw that the beta for WOW Cataclysm is coming soon, or maybe has even started. That has me wanting to reinstall WOW to take one last look at those places where I used to hang out so much, before Blizzard plows them under to build anew.

But then I realized, you can’t go home again. Sitting out in Westfall in the wee hours, chatting with friends, having a beer or three in real life while I did so, watching the lighthouse’s beam sweep across the sea… if I went back now, it wouldn’t be the same as what it was; it’d just be depressing. Like when I go to visit my mom in my home town and pop into my old haunts and realize I’m just another tourist weekending in The Hamptons. I’m not the only one who moved on, and there’s no longer a “there” there.

Anyway, enough of being maudlin.

So LOTRO is packed away. Life is crazy hectic and unpleasant. And I keep buying (mostly single player) games. I mentioned this on Twitter today and got a few people who said they do the same thing. The busier I get, the more games I buy. Not the more games I play, mind you. I get them home, find 20 minutes to tear off the shrinkwrap and fire them up, then never get back to them.

So why do I keep buying them? I guess it’s the only way I have to feel connected to this hobby that used to be such a huge part of my life. I want to play, but can’t. Somehow the retail therapy of buying a new game scratches that itch for a few moments. I bought Monster Hunter Tri the week it came out. Played it once. 3D Dot Heroes this week. Booted it up, looked at it, haven’t had time to go back. Red Dead Redemption is coming next week. Bought the Humble Bundle of Indie games and never even got around to downloading it. Bought the Civ IV collection from Steam last night…those I did install but never booted up. And so on and on… so much wasted money!

The one bright spot right now is the iPad. I’m still playing that silly Godfinger game; it’s something I can spend 5 minutes on 3 times a day and feel like I’m making some progress, though towards what, I don’t know. When I hit level 50 I’ll just stop playing probably. Ditto We Rule. Log in a few times a day for 2-3 minutes…it’s a nice break. And a bunch of other simple fun games that I can play for a couple minutes in bed before lights out.

This patch will ease up eventually. I took the whole week of E3 off, to follow all the news and to recharge my batteries. So that, at least, I have to look forward to. And come hell or high water I’m going to find some time for Red Dead Redemption next week! I’m about at the limit of what I’m willing to do for my day job. We’ve all been doing ~12 hour days for a couple weeks (and then I have my blogging job once that’s done) and at this point it’s just starting to feel like management is taking advantage of us. Getting through an unexpected crunch is one thing, but those can’t be permanent hours (at least not without a juicy raise or some fat bonuses!)

Anyway, that’s what’s going on at Dragonchasers HQ. If you’re someone I used to chat with on Twitter or in blog comments, please forgive my disappearance. It just can’t be helped. I do miss my social networking chums, though. Hope everyone is doing well out there!

EVE? Yeah, I’m still playing

Posted on by Nimgimli

It was March 7th when I posted that I’d started playing EVE Online.

Today I finished the tutorials. 🙂

Y’know you’re not finding much gaming time when every time Raptr announces that you’re playing a title someone welcomes you to the game.

After so long of sneaking in a few minutes here and there to play, while always obediently following the tutorial tracks, I found myself at a bit of a loss when I was finally done. So, once more obediently, I set my auto-pilot to take me 22 jumps to Sister Mary Elephant, or whomever that first tutorial agent…the old-school tutorial agent…sends us to.

Along the way I was playing Godfinger on my iPad, not really paying that much attention. But system after system, the security level dropped. I wasn’t flying the sweet new destroyer I’d been given at the end of the advanced combat tutorials so I wasn’t too worried. But still…

So I set down my iPad and kept my eyes peeled and sure enough! Someone locked on to me. I hit the afterburners and jumped before he fired a shot. Heck maybe he wasn’t even planning to fire a shot. But I have to say it got my heart beating!!

So now, who knows what. All my stuff is way back across the galaxy. My ‘safe’ plot took me through 0.5 systems. Maybe the Sister of Eve will send me back home to find an agent nearer to where all my ships are.

Like I said, I’m a bit adrift (no pun intended) and still struggling to decide if it makes any sense to pay for a sub when I have so little time to play. I figure with the Tyrannis (?) expansion coming soon I’ll at least stick around through that, and see what it’s all about.

I need to remember not to play EVE like other MMOs… not to go from theme park ride to theme park ride, and instead to make my own goals and work towards them. I had that clearly in mind when I started but 5 weeks of doing tutorials will kind of make a drone out of you (I should point out that 5 weeks = 7-8 playing sessions for me).

EVE noobs: losing your first ship

Posted on by Nimgimli

I lost my first ship in EVE tonight.

Yeah, I’ve been playing for a few weeks, but don’t for a second think it’s taken me this long to lose a ship due to any skill on my part. It took me this long because I don’t play much and when I do I’ve been puttering around in 1.0 space mining and junk. And this ship, to my eternal shame, was lost in a PvE Tutorial mission!

Anyway, here’s what I learned, so other EVE noobs won’t be as surprised as I was:

1) Insurance, even Platinum Insurance, isn’t going to get you a new ship. My little frigate was fully insured. Problem was that no one was selling a replacement for what the insurance company thought it was worth. So just like in real life, you’re going to have to have cash on hand to make up the difference between your insurance payout and the street cost of a new ship.

2) That said, newbie ships, at least, are pretty cheap. Don’t panic when yours goes boom! You’ll be back on your feet in no time.

3) Do shop around. By traveling 3 jumps (all through 1.0 space…I think I could’ve flown my pod but I didn’t) I saved about 40% of the cost of my replacement ship. Yes, and still the insurance payout wasn’t enough. At my local station, the ship I was replacing was going for more than twice the insurance payout.

4) Be prepared to refit. I had plenty of weapons and afterburners and stuff; but I had no ammo! Not a single slug. I had more than I could ever use in the ship I lost. So in future I’ll remember to carry only as much ammo as I’ll need for the mission at hand. Not that noob ammo is all that expensive but it’s just so wasteful losing so much to the void…

Hmmm, it just occurred to me… I wonder if I could’ve flown back out to my own wreck and salvaged from it? Does anyone know?

Weekend recap

Posted on by Nimgimli

I realized it’s been a full week since my last post here at Dragonchasers. In an attempt to convince my 4 readers not to ditch this RSS feed, I figured I’d share what my gaming’s been looking like recently.

Life has been super-busy lately, leaving not too much time for gaming. While I lament that fact often, the truth is that with scarcity comes value. When I *do* get to relax and play a game, I’m really enjoying myself.

My experiment in EVE continues. I’m *still* on my trial account but plan on switching over to a paying account when it finally runs out. I’m still learning a ton of new things in every play session, as infrequent as they are. I’ve gotten sucked into that mindset that thinks it’s ok to pay $15/month to log into a game once or twice a week since my character is still learning even when I can’t play. That’s a bit of genius on the part of CCP! Yesterday I finally went through an entire tutorial mission sequence (yes, I’m very much still doing the bidding of the Civilian/Tutorial agents), culminating in a rather difficult assignment to take a particularly irksome pirate. I limped home with 15% hull integrity and my pulse racing. So now I’m hooked.

Last Tuesday I started playing FF XIII; this seems to be a divisive title. Some people love it, others hate it. My feelings toward the game have been following a sin wave. I loved it at first, then started getting down on it, but now the love is coming back. Once the spectacle of the graphics and sounds wore off I was a bit bored with gameplay, but finally I’m getting new options and have hit some challenging bits. And I’ve found this isn’t the kind of game I can sit down and play for marathon sessions. I like it the most when I play for about an hour (which means I’ll be playing it for a *long* time). Happily save points are frequent enough that I can do that. (Can you believe some folks are upset with the frequency of Save Points? Considering they function as Shops and Workbenches as well as places to save, that seems…well… dumb. If you don’t want to use one, just go past it.)

Lastly I continue to struggle with Echo Bazaar. Or rather, Echo Bazaar continues to struggle with me. This is a wonderfully written web-based grind-fest. The problem seems to be that it is a victim of its own success. The site is glacially slow most of the time, turning a delightful little diversion into an exercise in frustration. And yet I keep going back to it to see what new Opportunities have arisen. Someone needs to write a book based in Fallen London!

And that’s about all of my gaming for the past week! Sad, no?

But PAX East is coming the weekend after next and I’m taking off a few days around it. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up on my gaming then. As for catching up on my blogging? I’m not sure when I’ll find time for that! Thanks for sticking around, though!

The EVE rite of noobness passage

Posted on by Nimgimli

Stargrace is the first one I heard use the term “Nomadic Gamer” and I’ve decided I like that a lot more than “MMO Tourist.” Tourist to me has a negative connotation. You can travel a lot, visit many places and as long as you show some respect for the people, places & cultures you’re visiting, you won’t be considered a tourist.

[I should point out that I grew up in a summer resort so I may have a more negative reaction to the word “tourists” (which in my family was *always* preceded by the word “damned”) than most.]

Anyway, dissembling out of the way, I’ve decided to follow Stargrace and Petter into EVE. This is not technically my first visit; I played back when the game first launched, and once, very briefly, since. But I kept hearing about how the game had changed.

Now I was always an enthusiastic EVE Observer; I loved reading the stories about wars and scams and deals that went down in the game. But I assumed there was no place for someone like me; someone not willing to commit to playing a single MMO as his main leisure time activity. But Stargrace convinced me otherwise; or at least convinced me enough to give the game a try. A *generous* 21-day trial (as long as a current player invites you) really helped in this decision. I’d heard the horror stories of the steep learning curve and knew that if I tried to force myself to learn the basics of the game in a short time I’d walk away in disgust. [Darkfall’s $1, 7-day trial leaves a bitter taste in my mouth after learning of EVE’s free 21-day trial.]

I’ve been taking things very slowly indeed. Two challenges I face: 1) there’s a lot to learn that isn’t at all obvious (as Blue Kae pointed out to me…prior MMO know-how isn’t very useful here) and after a long day of coding and writing for my two jobs, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about stuffing more content into my tired brain. And 2) laugh if you will, but EVE is the only PC game I’ve played that makes me put on my reading glasses. Even with the on-screen font bumped up to 12 pt, wide (the max it will go), I can’t read it without glasses. Which means I have to lean forward to play so that the glasses will focus on the screen. Silly, but it means my eyes tire very quickly while playing. I’m hoping this eases up some when I’m not reading tutorials constantly.

But I started Thursday night, and this morning I hit that point that every EVE ultra-noob eventually comes to:

Yes, I’m doing the Mining Tutorial! With this new-found knowledge, the world galaxy is my oyster!

Kidding aside, figuring things out and learning a game that’s so markedly different is turning out to be a heck of a lot of fun, as long as I go at my own pace. It really, *really* helps to have a group of folks willing to offer help and advice when I get lost. Petter formed a little Corps that has a nice handful of Twitter/Buzz/Blogger types in it, and that helps a bunch too. Nice to have a channel where I can ask dumb questions and not be (maliciously, at least!) laughed at.

Now I guess I need to go track down the EVEMon program and see what that’s all about. Until the next green pasture of MMO goodness beckons, I’ll see you Nomads in EVE!

Perfect World Entertainment bringing Forsaken World to NA

Posted on by Nimgimli

Just announced via Twitter, Perfect World is bringing Forsaken World to NA.

You can read the announcement here, or visit the preview site to explore what this new (to us here in NA at least) MMO has to offer.

I’m going to go do my own exploring because, frankly, I’ve never heard of this one. But there’s a Vampire class so it can’t be all bad!

Expansions are feeling a little bit pricey

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m going to talk about SOE’s Sentinel’s Fate expansion for EQ2, but what I’m saying applies to pretty much every ‘boxed’ expansion (even if that box is virtual) for MMOs. Try to keep that in mind.

Yesterday I went to Best Buy and bought Sentinel’s Fate. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision. I had been rolling the idea of returning to WoW around in my head, and Petter convinced me not to, but the ‘new MMO in my life’ seed had been planted. Not that I’m new to EQ2; I’ve played it on and off since it launched. But I haven’t played it for nearly a year at this point, and hey! New expansion. So why not?

There was a standard edition for $40 and a collector’s edition for $70. As far as I could tell, the difference was that the $70 version came with a mount. There were some physical gee-gaws too, but Angela has the collector’s edition so I figured I could play with her figurine if I really felt the need to do so. $30 for a mount sounded insane; maybe there were other differences that I didn’t pick up on. Frankly $70 was out of my price range so I didn’t look too closely.

So I pay my $40+ tax and get home. Don’t really need the disks, I’m told. I can just patch in Sentinel’s Fate once I activate it on my account. To do that I have to re-subscribe of course. $15 for a month. I start the patcher expecting it’ll run overnight or something. About 15 minutes later it was done.

And it struck me that I’d spent $55 to play this new content for a month. That seems steep to me; I could’ve bought a brand new MMO I’d never played for that much. Most new games cost $50 and give you a month to play for free. By deciding to return to EQ2 I’m actually paying $5 more than I would to play a game I’ve never played before.

And, from an emotional point of view, the fact that it could be patched in very quickly made it *feel* like a small expansion. I know that’s silly… basically I’m faulting a really efficient patcher and that’s no honest reflection of how big the content is. Or maybe something is fubar’d; I haven’t patched my client since maybe last summer at some point. How could it patch so quickly!? Is the new streaming technology built into Sentinel’s Fate?

But I digress. I think $55 is a lot to ask of people who’re returning to your game, and who represent potential sustained increased income if your content hooks them.

I was fine paying $40 to see what was new in EQ2, and this isn’t a case of bait-and-switch or anything. Sony is very above-board in letting you know you’ll need a sub and all that. But for some reason this time it just ‘clicked’ that I was paying $55, not $40, to try the new content, and that’s sort of soured the experience for me before I’ve even logged in.

The solution? Give a 30-day time credit with the purchase of a boxed expansion. When you activate that expansion, activate the account for 30 days (or extend the duration for already active accounts). Sure, that’s going to be a big dip in subscription income for a month, but think of the goodwill you’d generate and potential long-term increase in revenue. Alternatively, give the 30-day credit only to accounts that have been inactive for 3-months; then you’d just be covering people newly returned to the game (though that could be a real PR nightmare).

Anyway, I think next time an extension for an MMO I’m not currently playing comes out, I’ll wait for a sale or a price drop.

My turn to look at Allods Online

Posted on by Nimgimli

Free to play MMOs are a dime a dozen these days, so I’m not sure why Allods Online seems to have caught the attention of the group of bloggers and twitter people I fraternize with. Maybe it was the disgustingly cute “Gibberling” race that first drew their eye? Gibberlings are these short furry critters that travel in groups of three. My understanding is that you play all 3 as a single entity… in other words if you roll a gibberling your ‘character’ consists of 3 of the little buggers.

I wouldn’t know for sure. Y’see, I went Empire. Anybody who is anybody rolls Empire. To hell with little cute furballs and winged elves.

Meet Locust. He’s a Risen Savant. The Risen seem to be half undead, half robot. I know his pet is a robotic scorpion. So what’s a Savant? I dunno. I didn’t research this stuff. It sounded interesting so I picked it. Locust tosses spells around and swings a staff (pretty ineffectively). Poison seems to be his strength. He’s got a DoT and a Direct Damage spell. He’s got Vampirism which transfers health from the baddie to him. And he’s got his pet robot scorpion. Mind you, he’s only level 5 or so…I’m still fumbling along.

Allods Online won’t shock you with its originality, at least at first. Lots of gamers call it a WoW clone. I dunno how true that is. At the most basic and obvious levels I suppose. But the same can be said for many games. I don’t remember having a venom spewing half-undead half-robot mecha-scorpion-controlling vampire in WoW, but maybe that was in an expansion?

Kidding aside, you’ll feel very comfortable in Allods. See this paperdoll? Looks familiar enough, right? One nice thing, check the stats at the bottom. As far as I can figure, the ones with the green background and stars are the stats most important for your class. The ones with the blue font color are stats that are being enhanced by your gear. And yeah, there’re a lot of stats. Every level (at least up to 5) you get 1 measly point to put into one of those 14 stats. Tough calls.

Every so often you get a talent point too. Yeah, and you have a talent tree. Some talents give you new abilities (Locust’s scorpion buddy came from a talent), other times you just get new abilities automagically when you level up.

Oddly enough, Locust is called a Summoner in the paper doll. I just now noticed that. I’m thinking that’s his archetype. I *think* both the Empire and the Cuties (or whatever the other side is called… Cotton Candy Bandits? Oh wait, I think it’s The League) have the same archetypes (Scout, Healer, Warrior etc) but class names differ between the sides.

There’s a lot of “I thinks” in this post. Y’know why? Because Allods is free to download, free to play. I love that. I do my research by playing. (And I need to play more!) I don’t have to fret about whether or not it’s worth the price: there is no initial price!

The biggest downside of Allods Online, by the way, is that it is free. If you decide to play, the VERY FIRST THING to do is to click on the Chat Interface (bottom left corner of the chat window) and turn off all public channels. The community in Allods Online (most of whom, I assume, are 12 year old boys trying to figure out why they no longer think girls are gross) will have you down on your knees praying for the Zombie Apocalypse to come and wipe the stain of humanity off the face of the earth. So turn those idiots off, pronto!

Quests? There are quests! Here’s a Quest Window. Looks familiar, right? Yah.

Here’s the thing about quests in Allods. I know it isn’t fashionable to make your brain take all those little squiggles and recognize them as letters, and then bunch the letters into words, and smoosh the words into sentences, and then… y’know, READ the quest text. That’s a LOT of work and so 1995 after all. But just this once, you should take the time to read them. The quest text in F2P MMOs is usually amusing due to awful translation, but here the quests are well written and often subtly funny (no, this screen shot isn’t an example of a subtly funny quest; it’s just a random shot I had).

Here’s an example that you won’t find funny now that I’ve told you the quests are funny: Early on some NPC tells you this epic tale that ends with you having to kill some crows since they symbolize a big bad from back in the day. (Hey, I said they were funny; I didn’t say I was memorizing them word for word.) So you head off and dutifully kill the crows (talk to the dude with the captive Gibberlings first…he wants crow meat and you can double up) and head back to the NPC and she starts up again with an epic speech but then basically admits that she’s in charge of keeping the statue behind her clean and the crows were shitting all over it, and that’s why she wanted you to kill them.

I told you that you wouldn’t think it was funny. But if you’d read it in-game without me building it up so much, you would’ve chuckled. Or not. I chuckled. But then I have a refined sense of humor. You probably just want Chuck Norris jokes. Maybe you should leave the Community chat on after all. Maybe you are Part of the Problem!

Anyway, here’s a full-blown screen shot with interface and all that. You can click on it if you really want to see the 1680×1050 version. Point is, it all looks familiar, right? Comfortable even. I’m finding that’s actually a strength of Allods. I can just slip into it and play without any preparation to speak of. And yet the two classes I’ve tried (Savant and Psionist) play differently enough from classes in other games that I’m finding them pretty interesting.

I think its a pretty game too, and that helps. It runs nicely. It’s free. There’s some concern over item shop prices but let’s wait until the game is officially launched before we get too worked up over that (it’s in beta now, but characters will carry over to launch, we’re told). Apparently the shop was open and was showing the cost of a bump in inventory space from 18 to 24 slots for $20 US. Crazy! When I last played, the shop was closed. If they really run with that price, we can all just stop playing until they see some sense and reduce the cost, then we can go back. Because its free! Which is why you should give it a try.

But don’t just take my word for it. Petter at Don’t Fear the Mutant and Dickie at Rainbow MMO each have a nice “First Look” kind of post up (ergo the “My Turn” in the title of this post).

Maybe hyping a game like this really does it a disservice. There’s always that contingent of gamers who want to piss on anything that a group of folks is enjoying. I went into Allods Online with very, very modest expectations and maybe that was why I was so delighted with what I found. I wouldn’t suggest firing it up expecting it to be your main MMO for the next 2 years. Fire it up expecting it to be a distraction for the evening, and enjoy it for what it is, and for what you paid for it. Maybe it’ll last, maybe it won’t. I guess I’ll almost definitely be playing it until Monday. Maybe longer, but I don’t want to get too crazy about planning for the future. I’ll just live for today.

And yet, some part of me really wants to believe I’ll someday be fighting this guy:

My Little Pony from Hell

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here’s a neat story (or I thought so, at least). Jason from Perfect World Entertainment sent out a PR email about a mount design contest they held for Ether Saga Online. A player who goes by “Monaka” won with her design for a “Dark Nocturne,” aka My Little Pony from Hell.

Here’s a longish video of an artist doing the coloring on the mount (you’ll probably want to skip around through it):

ishy on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

And an image of it ingame:

You can read more about the contest and the winner on the Perfect World Entertainment blog.

I have to confess I don’t play Ether Saga Online, but I have kind of a soft spot for Perfect World Entertainment since they a) published Torchlight and b) hired all-around good guy Sam Houston after he got laid off from GamerDNA.