A trip back in time to when World of Warcraft came out. People tend to forget that WoW is a mature game, and new MMOs are always compared against the current state of WoW rather than its state at release. While it’s not fair to new MMOs, it’s going to happen and… well, it is fair. As the game ages, it becomes even harder to be compared against it (e.g. think any game can have anywhere near as many zones at launch of any decent level of quality? Think again). Was this worth me coming out of hiding for? Probably not, but here’s your link: MMORPG.com’s First Impressions of World of Warcraft

First off, Minecraft is incredible. It’s got a bit of a learning curve but it is absolutely wonderful. It is going to create a new genre. There are so many places this can be taken there WILL be a new genre started by this game. Secondly, you people who are participating in the DDoS attack are complete idiots. You have no idea what it takes to make a game, and your child-like bitching is screwing over other players, not the person working his ass off on Minecraft. Get off your jackass horses and stop it so we can play. More about the DDoS attack here.

Just a little rant. It’s been almost 12 hours since I submitted a petition on their website. I decided to reactivate my account for the dozenth time today. It was a giant pain to even figure out which account I wanted to reactivate, in part because I had to be on a very specific login form to even get it to tell me anything (if you account isn’t active, most of the login forms just act as if you put in the wrong info). When I finally found the right one (yes, I have two or three and there’s only one I care about)… “Account is banned.”

Derp?

The last time I played was at least a year ago, and I played up until the subscription lapsed without ever having done anything against the ToS or being contacted by anyone official. I let my subscription run out, was never informed that the account was banned (for what reason, I have no idea), and they have no phone CS and are not responding to my petition to let me give them my money. I would also have noticed if an email was ever sent stating that my account was activated by a hacker.

Dear CCP, please advise. Why did you ban an innocent account holder and why won’t you respond to my please to let me give you cash moneys? Sometimes it’s hard being on the player end of things.

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 »