Obruo

Saw an interesting post on addiction in online games at this blog, I find it interesting for a few reasons, 1) The time played is a joke for hardcore players from “back in the day.” 2) The comments, read em, some good stuff down there. I really don’t think that most people play mmo games for the “lewtz” or whatever, long run people stay for the social interactions… their friends. Shrug, just thought it was a bit interesting.

Update: There were 2 updated posts regarding the responses to the first one, they are here and here.

The burning crusade is a pretty neat looking expansion for World of Warcraft. With the expected changes however there are some massive changes being made to the addon system for the game. Basically, people are going to lose the ability to change targets with an addon or rearrange target windows or use any logic in spell casting (eg: Auto scale spells, have it pick from several spells based on target type (Eg: If i click this button and a hostile is targeted cast x, if a friendly is targeted cast y.) It also is going to be a massive determent to the accessibility of the game in general for the handicapped. I generally wouldn’t have a problem with a game coming out that isn’t equally accessible to everyone, but WOW has been out for 2 years almost… these people have played and paid monthly for the game for that entire period of time… and all of a sudden blizzard is yanking the carpet out from under them. It just feels way wrong in my book. Anywho here’s a link to the digg story I just made, it has links to both of the blizzard offical threads and a thread from a c5/6 quadriplegic who feels like they’re getting the shaft… and I agree.

WOW Story on Digg

New one is up for viewing. This one doesn’t feel as significant or as interesting as last years unfortunately… although somehow I doubt many of the publishing companies appreciated last years heh…

GDC 2006, Developers Rant

For something that might you might find to be an actual interesting piece…

Escapist Issue 61

Issue 60

Excellent Issue. The “D&D Therapy” is a killer read and mirrors alot of my experiences in the early years of my youth with D&D, “It’s satanic” speil and such. I mean I played D&D and I turned out fine… right? Hey… guys? Right? Hello? Okay, okay, there were the few people who I had to kill but it was a necessity! I didn’t have a choice, thats prefectly normal right?! hehe

Btw, most of you who know me irl know about my love of the escapist magazine (online), they have a killer interview with Raph presently and he discusses swg and uo and the good and bad of each. Interesting tidbit…

“I didn’t like a lot of the subsequent choices - thinking here of Holocron drops, [Temporary Enemy Flag] changes, group sizes, buff expansions, global market, entertainer changes, creature handler removal, levels, a lot of the combat upgrade … I could give you my opinions there, but there’s no point - even those changes have been changed. Many of them were essentially trying to dig out of the hole that launching prematurely had caused. I can’t really blame anyone for them, whether I agreed with the decisions or not. The whole time, the team worked their ass off and tried their best.

I’ll make an exception for the NGE. I don’t think you can or should change a game that radically out from under a user base. You dance with the ones that brung ya, whether they are the market of your dreams or not. They have invested their passion and built expectations about where they want the game to go. Changing things out from under them isn’t fair in my mind, especially given how they have been loyal to you in times of trouble. It’s like dumping the girlfriend who has always been patient and loving to chase after the supermodel who probably won’t love you back.” - Raph Koster (the escapist magazine interview)

Go read the rest of the interview… but my point is… this is pretty much what everyone who left the swg community has said since they butchered it. Good to see that changes like that don’t sit well even with some of the original creative content behind the game.