Making a difference

We're starting a new Warhammer guild, one that hopes to affect real change to the biggest problem plaguing the game. That's right: Gingers.

We hope to remove this insidious scourge completely from the game by forming an elite Witch Hunter Death Squad, a Gingerish Inquistion. We shall seek out and destroy completely any of those born with the Curse of Gingerness, forcing them to quit the game or forever face our righteous wrath. Their heresy must stand no longer. They are abominations in the eyes of God, and in His name shall we rend their ghostly white daemon-flesh from their horrific freckled faces, slicing off each of these orange-brown pockmarks of the devil with our rapiers and burning them all in our great ginger pyres.

Join us, brothers. The Lord's work needs doing.
Fear not the Daywalkers...

Under the radar

re: Rift demos
City Raids in Rift?

Quote:

I saw several lower-level battlegrounds tiered for levels 8-10, 16-20, and 10-19, marked as capture-the-flag events.

We know Rift will offer both PvP and PvE servers, and the Trion team assured us that a PvP-flagging mechanic would be in place even on PvE servers, allowing for both consensual PvP and PvP during city raids (yes, city raids!). In fact, Scott told us that the team is considering allowing experience to be gained during PvP sessions, if that doesn't prove too unbalancing to the world-experience and dungeon-experience formulae.

ALSO

Apparently there's a game in beta that involves boobies and mugging other players.
Sounds exciting except for the whole Korea thing. This leads me to believe that 90% of the game will involve grinding Pokemon nipple-turtles (Turple! Turple!) for 8 days until you to get to level 6.











Sign me up.









Funniest MMOment of the Week?
You decide...


FFXIV's fatigue system explained: if you play for more than an hour, an angry Japanese guy turns off your XP, repeatedly yells "You go now!" until you uninstall and play a game that is fun.

Cryptic admits they've done nothing but rush out mediocre, half-finished games, because they want you to buy their next game.

Warhammer announces their truimphant "expansion" finally, immediately gets 140 different Rage Threads and death threats on official forums.

Bioware says advanced classes for Jedi and Sith will include "Wizard" and "Sorceror".
Just call me Darth Potter.

The SWTOR space combat mini-game alone already looks more fun than the 36 different MMOs relased this year, combined.
 

The MAN is keeping me down.

I want to blog, I just CAN'T.
I think I'm now under 30 different concurrent Non-Disclosure Agreements.

OMFGW2

• "Manifesto" Video, in case you haven't seen it.

That's all for today.
I don't even have it in me to make fun of Alganon or Chronicles of Spellborn. That's like Brock Lesnar beating the shit out of Bea Arthur, no one wants to see that.

RIFTwatch

via MMORPG.com

"I asked [Trion Creative Honcho Scott Hartman] about [Rift's] plans to deal with [PvP] balance issues and he had a pretty surprising response. Scott actually enjoys people thinking about the balance challenges, as he feels that people are thinking of ways that combinations could end up being “too much fun” and that their stance is that they don’t even really want the system to be perfectly balanced. Indeed, Scott doesn’t even believe achieving perfect balance is something to aspire to, as players would be able to do everything and no one would feel special. Scott doesn’t view balance as a huge issue in a game like Rift where you can switch things at a whim, as opposed to your typical MMO where if something gets nerfed you may be stuck with it. Ultimately, Scott expects that there will be “out of balance” builds, but that the possibilities are so great with the soul system that players can discover new “out of balance” builds to trump or counter one already in existence."

Translation: PvP in this game is going to be a wild hayride of cookie-cutter Flavor of the Month builds, but that's part of the charm of PvP, no?

"expect to see three quality warfronts (battlegrounds) at launch, as they are testing five or six right now and they expect the best ones to rise to the top. The idea being that they’d rather have three solid offerings over six that are “meh” as “no one comes back to meh.” One of the warfronts they are testing at the moment actually incorporates the rift gameplay as well."

MEH.
No, I'm fine with this as well, I suppose. I think Warhammer players learned this eventually, it's better to have a handful of well-liked battlegrounds and look forward to the introduction of other, fun new ones, as opposed to just throwing out 12 different instances and 8 of them range from being painfully lackluster to lustlackingly full of pain.

Throwing rifts in there sounds fun, too.

"Scott and I discussed the impact of population balance on their game as they make use of a two-faction system which has been shown to be problematic for other games in the past, but Scott feels trying to win that battle isn’t really possible, so they intend to make up the player deficit by introducing NPCs where necessary."

Wait, what? You can't just say that and not explain it!

"What happens if the population imbalance gets too out of hand?"
"NPCs"
"What?"
"The jeeps come."

"I don't understand."
"Listen, asshole, we're making another Everquest, we don't give a shit about all this PvP balance shit."
"Oh, OK then."


I also love the line 'trying to win that battle isn’t really possible'.
Is this attitude towards balance completely crazy, lazy, or genius...?
It makes me afraid, yet also oddly titillated.

The Bad Days

This is a very bad time for MMORPGs. A bleak, half-forgotten Dark Age that we will solemnly discuss in very hushed tones only once it's safe, once we're playing The Old Republic.

"My god, what did we do during that time?"
"We did what we had to! We did what we had to survive!"
"I- I did horrible things! I... had no choice. I played Warhammer! I played Aion!"

And we'll look back and laugh and cry and shudder at the thought of playing such shitty, shitty games.

The irony now, at this current juncture, is that we're already nitpicking the big games coming out.

"Oh noes, teh Star Wars space combat is going to be a 5-minute mini-game? That's a deal-breaker! Boo hoo hurr durr!"

Relax yourselves. Even if SWTOR is only a tenth as good as we think it could be, it will still be 100 times more enjoyable than whatever crapbomb MMOs that are out now. Help is on the way, the cavalry is coming.

In the meantime, we'll have to scavenge amongst the debris looking for rat carcasses to sate our ravenous appetites.

I know I'll be trying the Vindictus CB this week, and you can tell it's bad when I'm even mentioning that. The game appears to be an Asian-made F2P 2-button hack-n-slasher that revolves around 2 stock characters. 2, as in two.
And ... I hope it's fun. I hope it is fun and stupid and I can kill things for a little while and not hate myself.
We'll see.

I also applied for the Bloodline Champions beta, just for the hell of it. But they are playing hard to get and haven't officially accepted me. For some reason, this makes me really want to get in and play this now.

Maybe other MMO's should look into that. Have Warhammer just start canceling random accounts saying "Oh, sorry man, you're just not my type."
"WHAT? You're turning me down? Just give me a chance, you won't be sorry! Please let me play your game!"

The world needs more mediocre superhero MMOs

• PvP in the forthcoming DCUO will involve some open-world shenanigans (don't worry, Care Bears, you have to 'flag' yourself for combat. Just like in the comics, right? You'd never see Joker just jump the Batman from behind, what kind of sense would that make), and some instanced battlegroundy type stuff, including a  2v2 King of the Hill match, 4v4 group-on-group action, as well as 8v8 and 16v16. I know what you're saying, "Spider Love, I don't give a shit!", yeah, sure, you don't care now, but when you see my 8-man Aquaman Gank Squad totally pwning noobs with our quick-strike Fish Communication skills, bringing sperm whale-sized pain to the world, you'll think twice about doubting this game.

• But seriously, watch these Q+A sitdowns that DCUO's crew has with the geeks at these comic book conventions and wait for the inevitable "Green Lantern Rage" moment.

Comic Book Dork dressed head-to-toe in green: "Hi, I'm a huge Green Lantern fan, I have 46 separate Lantern tattoos, I named my children Green Lantern and Kilowog and I call my wife 'Hal Jordan' in bed. I once killed a man because he said that Thor could defeat Green Lantern. Literally, I strangled him to death. So, my question is will you be able to play as a Lantern, with Green Lantern powers?

DC rep: "Uh... we won't have that at launch, but it's something we were working on because it's pretty cool, so, yeah. Maybe later, I guess?"

Comic Book Dork: "..." /blinks violently, has blood coming out of nostrils and ear canals.

• Herp durp durp? 
• Derp.

Real Life Quote of the Week

"Spider, why are your shoelaces brown?"

"They used to be white but they changed colors after all the ASS-KICKING I've done."

I can save you, Warhammer.

Stop laying off people, the game can be saved!
I'll tell you how to bring people to the game and keep them playing. It's so obvious it's kind of crazy.

They're introducing customizable armor appearance in the next patch, right?

Here's how you save the game. Two words.

Full. Frontal. Nudity. Armor.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Vent Quote of the Week

"No, she's pure evil. She doesn't have a vagina, it's more like a graveyard of un-souls erupting in flame and shadow."


"Whoa. Does she have a sister you could hook me up with?"