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Role Playing (Games) Quickies

When MMOGs Ruled The Quickies 40

Posted by Zonk from the fear-them dept.
This summer it seems like Massive games are the only good news going, and this week has been busy. R. Spencer writes "1UP explores MMO addiction and, in true confessional style, opens the floor to heavy users and recovered junkies. It's especially interesting how much the mechanisms of MMO addiction have in common with other forms of addiction. The primary source of addiction nowadays seems to be World of Warcraft. If you're jonesing right now, you might want to check out this Guide to the Creation of the Scarlet Monastery on the official site. Additionally, Mogg writes "For new players, GamerGod has a up part one of a guide to the game World of Warcraft." This is Tobold's first writerly foray at the new site. Luck to him. For something a little different, 1up explores the world of Sociolotron...a Sex MMOG. Speaking of sex, SOE has been busy lately. The end to the Quest for Antonia search is almost here. They've put up new details on future EQ2 content, and announced a dramatic downsizing of The Matrix Online. See, when no one plays, you don't need as many servers. The new content mob is rearing his head all over with Secrets of the Syren in the works on Star Wars Galaxies, CoH Issue 5 coming up soon, and screenshots from the next Guild Wars update available. MMORPG.com continues to put out interesting editorials, with a look at the stories in Massive Games. Finally, the highly respectable Nick Yee has published a new edition of The Daedalus Project. The seminal source of MMOG statistics on the web has articles on participation in games at the level cap, introductions to the genre, and the stress of loot. As always, participation in the survey helps ensure future issues have good data.
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When MMOGs Ruled The Quickies More

When MMOGs Ruled The Quickies

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  • It'd be hard to be offtopic...

    (Yes I realize it'd be funny to mod this off topic)

    Now if someone could just release a /. article that would be immune to redundancy, trolling, and blatant flamebait.

    Good reads and interesting stuff in there though.

  • I havne't had a day of not playing since I got the game recently, but I'm sure I can quit anytime...

  • And WoW still hasn't fixed the classes... (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Remember the article on class balancing in WoW [slashdot.org] back from June? Well, apparently they did listen - they made a totally pointless an ineffective nerf to WoTF, making it from totally overpowering down to extremely overpowering.

    However, they still haven't addressed Shamans totally overpowering every single Alliance class. They buffed some of the Horde racials too, making the Horde even more powerful against the Alliance. Plus, Battlegrounds itself is also biased in favor of the Horde!

    There is still some prog
    • Strange coincidence...

      SOE released the combat upgrade in SWG not too long ago. All it did, however, was move the overpowering from some templates to others. Then, the game was met with a slew of content publishes, while long standing bugs got worse.

      Now they pledge to release mostly bug fixes for the next few publishes.
      • Many of the developers for SWG were devs on Ultima Online, and if you can remember what their patching situation was like, there was simply no end to horrible, game-breaking bugs. Every patch resulted in new, bad bugs. Balance was never achieved. SWG is exactly the same, I believe because the developers are making the exact same mistakes with it that they made with UO years ago.

        SWG has one of the worst track records of any mmorpg in terms of bugs and balance. Patch days invariably upset the current bala
    • Considering the rumoured Alliance/Horde player imbalance (I've heard numbers from 2:1 Alliance:Horde to 5:1 Alliance:Horde) across the servers, this can almost make sense in a game balance kind of way. Horde being the Protoss to the Alliance's Zerg, to use another Blizzard metaphore.

      Of course, Hunters *still* suck, no matter what side you're on, unless you're *realllly* good at kiting. :D
      • Yes exactly. It can't be as biased in favor of the horde as people say if such a high ratio of people still prefer Alliance. People would switch if the advantages were stacked that heavily with the Horde. When things start evening out, which may never happen, then you can quibble about fairness.

        The funny thing is that when I played on a server where Alliance was at a 3 or 4 to 1 advantage, the Horde was still more successful overall at PvP. They were organized, could control themselves in raids, knew
        • My guild has noticed that the Horde tend to be much more organized players as well. Anyone have any idea why this phenomenon exists? I don't even play on a PVP server, so you can't say that the Horde players have to be craftier to survive in a PVP server overpopulated with Alliance.
          Is it just because the Alliance side is swamped with many more bad players do to sheer numbers?
          • My guild has noticed that the Horde tend to be much more organized players as well. Anyone have any idea why this phenomenon exists?

            On my server (Boulderfist) I actually think the ratio of alliance to horde is fairly even. However, I have noticed that the Horde tend to be much better organized as well. I believe it has to do with two things:
            1) The Horde has an advantage to begin with since Shamans are very useful in BG (they have both things to slow down opponents and speed up themselves, and speed is

        • Yes exactly. It can't be as biased in favor of the horde as people say if such a high ratio of people still prefer Alliance. People would switch if the advantages were stacked that heavily with the Horde.

          The problem with this argument is that people have already spent a great deal of time on their characters before they begin playing BG (or in many cases before BG was even released). Initially, more people played as the Alliance because people tend to choose the "Good" races over the "evil" ones (take a

    • Hopefully Blizzard will stop releasing new raid content and concentrate on releasing patches that fix the issues with the game

      Yeah, you keep smoking that fadeleaf, buddy...
  • So Fraiser retired his sword. "I had no idea how addicted I was. It had been such a habit to walk in the door and head straight for the computer that it took physical effort to get out of that state of mind. We tried other MMORPGs, but they paled in comparison. So piece by piece, we just got over ourselves and moved on. It disgusts me when I look back. I could've done so much more in the real world that I didn't, and I regret that badly.

    This was exactly the case for my friends and I in high-school. Looki

    • My experience, as I've recovered from both video game and drug addictions is that the major difference lies in the chemical effect of drug/alcohol addictions.

      To quit an MMO when you're addicted requires an amount of effort equivalent to that of the phsycological component of a drug addiction. This effort is mainly to destroy the habit of your addiction, the physical action of sitting in front of the computer OR the physical action of taking a hit. Also, both addictions make inroads into other areas of you

  • When your room looks like this [livejournal.com]....

    I think the article about addiction downplays how addictive MUDs are in comparison; I have dreamt in text because of MUDding 8-12 hours a day.

  • Wow (Score:3)

    by jayhawk88 ( 160512 ) <jayhawk88@gmail.com> on Friday July 29, 2005 @04:55PM (#13198724)
    Matrix Online has three world servers now? Down from only nine? Damn, that's horrible. How can they even afford to run the servers with that few players?
    • They started too many servers too fast. Guess they were encouraged by the popularity of WoW and thought they were next. What's really sad is that they didn't do a bit of advertising. They let too many people in the beta who formed an opinion of the game and never came back to see if the bugs were fixed (much like people review open source software). The world (Mega City) is just so damn big that you hardly ever ran into anyone anyway. So now with only 3 servers maybe people won't get the feeling that n
      • Huh, that's funny. Matrix Online is the only MMO I've seen TV commercials for. They sure did quite a bit of advertising in gaming magazines as well.
        I just think too many people got turned off on the series after the last two movies to be interested.
        • They did advertising during the beta, then stopped.. which is just dumb marketting. As for getting turned off by the last two movies, I guess people just don't understand symbolism anymore. Maybe they should put warnings on the box: caution, this film contains depth. Here's a good overview for Reloaded [wylfing.net] and Revolutions [wylfing.net]. Worth reading even if you think you understood the films.
          • Read it. Read the source materials they pulled a lot of the philosophy from.
            I'm not saying there isn't stuff there for people to enjoy, just for me personally I didn't have any interest in playing the MMO.
          • I tried to watch the second one but was unable to get past trying to figure out where they found the cows to make all those leather jackets from and how they had time to construct the machinery and chemical processes to build those sunglasses they all seemed to wear.

            I only made it about ten minutes into the movie.

            There's nothing inherently wrong with symbolism but unless it's wrapped in something that's either meaningful or interesting to absorb it's pointless. A stop sign is a symbol, but I'm not going to

            • Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)

              by QuantumG ( 50515 )
              I tried to watch the second one but was unable to get past trying to figure out where they found the cows to make all those leather jackets from and how they had time to construct the machinery and chemical processes to build those sunglasses they all seemed to wear.

              They don't have anything like that on in the real world man. They all wear rags and other garbs that you would expect people who live in a hole in the ground. The clothes in the Matrix are all contrivances.
            • Where did all the cows come from? From the leftovers of all the steak Cypher and those who follow him have been eating...

              I'm glad MxO is condensing. It needs some work, needs to be folded into the SOE world, and only then will a re-promotion mean anything. Right now there's no point in promoting MxO as it would only give an incentive for a bunch of new people to dismiss it.

              MMOs need to hook people immediately and keep them for a few months; after that the investment of time in character and in friends ke
  • I love the game, but I makes sure to always go out with friends and such. I went to Vegas last weekend, gambled, visited the AH, picked up the flight path, and then got really drunk. Got to make sure you mix up your life.

  • Addiction to MUDs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Soleille ( 897615 ) on Friday July 29, 2005 @05:55PM (#13199046) Homepage Journal
    As an administrator of one of the larger free MUDs, Medievia, I see many players with addiction problems. Playing our game is very addicting and has led to school, marital, and family problems, not to mention the anti-social behavior of a lot of our players. If they are at home Mudding, they are not learnng valuable social skills, or so people say.

    We have realized this problem and have created a http://www.medievia.com/addiction.html [medievia.com] Medievia Addiction Page for the assistance of those players that need it.

    In addition, it is not uncommon for players to realize their problems and they request to be frozen for an extended period of time or have their playerfile purged altogether. We of course don't deny their requests. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't.

    • Re:Addiction to MUDs (Score:3, Interesting)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 )
      One of the few girls who did an IT degree around the same time as me had a MUDing problem. She didn't study, missed classes, missed exams, flunked courses. We all felt so sorry for her but none of us knew what to do. Eventually people started intervening. If we found her in the unix lab we'd harrass her to stop playing MUDs. That didn't work though, she stopped coming to uni altogether when she got herself an Internet connection with no weekly connection limits (as you can tell, this was quite a few ye
  • 1 WoW pve content upgrade in 7 months : BWL. 1 GW pve content upgrade in 3 months : 2 explorable areas. So where are the Blizzard Fanboy's eating their crow now that GW has come out with a content upgrade for free... not to mention in less time than WoW took?
  • I have an insane roommate who's an argumentative, messy asshole... But ever since he got WoW for Christmas, he never leaves his room except to work and leave the occasional Pizza mess on our stove. I LOVE World of Warcraft without even playing it.
  • I will admit that I am addicted to: World of Warcraft, City of Heroes and recently broke my addiction to Evercrack...Er...Everquest. I think that most people get into these games becase everone sees an Avatar not the real person. In a world where if you are not one of the "Beautiful People" you are mearly one of the "Huddled Masses" MMOG's give you the chance to BE the hero and not have to have the Wash Board Abs or be a Super Model. Your mind and your personality are what they see. And you get to play a Pe

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