Yet another issue to take me out of hiding, albeit briefly, is the fatigue system in Final Fantasy XIV. If you don’t know about it yet, read up. My comments here are actually based on a response on Massively that asserts that players want a grind, and uses the complaints over the fatigue system as proof. I will only criticize very briefly. First of all, “grind” does not mean “gain experience for putting forth effort.” The grind is simply a state of mind that players get into. It’s negative, and everyone has a different threshold. Nomenclature aside, here’s my main criticism: Players don’t like to grind. What they do like is to be rewarded for their efforts. The fundamental concept of most MMOs is that Effort = Reward, and the fatigue system as defined breaks that paradigm. That is all.

This is a post I didn’t publish about a month ago in response to EVE’s PLEX changes: “I’m curious as to the legal ramifications this may have. I’m guessing they’ve already figured any of those out because you can already sell PLEX, just not outside of the station you got them. Still, it’s $14.95 that can either be taken by another player or destroyed entirely in a blast. The latter is actually the scarier of the two for CCP, I think, because you’re now able to give them $$ for something that they can (be accused of) destroy(ing) via code.” Less than a month later, and someone destroyed more than $1000 of PLEX in one PvP battle. Continue Reading »

38 Studios has announced our first title, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, scheduled for release in fall 2011. Take a look at the press release and pay a visit to the Reckoning website for screenshots, a trailer, and concept art. Reckoning will be available for the PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, Xbox 360® videogame and entertainment system, and PC.

This is bad enough for me to come out of hiding. According to a post on the official forums, Blizzard will begin displaying everyone’s real first and last names with their forum posts. This is not only an invasion of privacy and something that will lead to stolen passwords and accounts even beyond the scope of Blizzard’s products, but it’s an incredible risk and will likely result in major real world problems (such as people being murdered because of who they are on the forums… and no, I’m not exaggerating). I’m linking the original post by Nethaera below because I assume they’ll get wise to how bad this decision is and will rescind the post eventually. Continue Reading »

While I haven’t completely abandoned this blog, I have obviously not been posting to it lately. Whether this is because I have nothing to say, I’m too busy at work, or I’ve become more interested in other hobbies that don’t have to do with blogging, I can’t really be sure. I just wanted to drop a note here that if I have anything particularly interesting to say, I’ll still post it here. If I don’t, I probably won’t.

I toyed with posting frequently enough just to keep the blog alive, but it would be a disservice to you to continue to repost other news just to retain readership, so I’ll refrain from the quantity and focus only on the quality (assuming I ever have anything particularly interesting I want to post about). Thanks for reading Nerfbat, and I’m sure it will ramp up again at some point, I just don’t when that time will come.