Archive for category MMO
Blizzard RealID: Welcome to WoWbook
A few days ago, Blizzard made an announcement that shocked the whole World Of Warcraft community, people who used to play but have quit, and even people who have never played the game before. Everyone seems to have an opinion on this, and almost all of those opinions are massively negative towards the idea.
The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it. These changes will go into effect on all StarCraft II forums with the launch of the new community site prior to the July 27 release of the game, with the World of Warcraft site and forums following suit near the launch of Cataclysm. Certain classic forums, including the classic Battle.net forums, will remain unchanged.
The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players — however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before. With this change, you’ll see blue posters (i.e. Blizzard employees) posting by their real first and last names on our forums as well.
They are trying to justify the move by saying it will make the forums a better place with less trolling and spam, but it’s not hard to see that there is a lot, lot more behind this move than what’s on the surface. If their sole reasoning was to remove trolling, they could have made you post with your account, and not a specific character (at the moment, you can make a level 1 character and post completely anonymously), if your whole account was being shown, you would be more careful with what you post. Instead, Blizzard look to be moving into Facebook territory. A move to Facebook integration with Battle.net could make a lot of money for both parties. As everyone knows, Farmville has a lot more players even than World Of Warcraft, and if Blizzard were able to tap into that market they could make a lot of money. It’s not long before we see updates on Facebook saying, “John Smith needs one more Primordial Saronite for his Uber Epix chestplate, can anyone help him?”, or, “Kate Bloggs has completed 75% of the achievement ‘Collect 200 top hats for the homeless’, that’s amazing!”.
However, in doing so, they are risking the security and privacy of all the people who post on the forum. In a community of millions of players, the chances are that some people are going to disagree with you and in very rare (but still possible) cases, want to take it further than just replying on the forum. Giving away your full name makes it incredibly easy to find out where you live, what your email address is, where you work, basically everything and anything about you. If the forums didn’t show this information, it would be incredibly hard if not impossible to find out anything, unless you explicitly told the person your email/name. It’s almost guaranteed that woman are not going to post on the forums anymore, as many hide behind male avatars so they don’t get harassed and stalked online by lonely men. Employers will search for your name when considering you for a job and will find posts by you explaining why this DPS rotation is better than that one, and like it or not they might reject you for it. A fine demonstration of this going wrong was when Blizzard employee Bashiok, the poor fool, posted his real name on the official forums, and an hour later everybody knew his phone number, house, family, and lots more.
The choice is, post on the forum and give away your identity to ANYONE who wants it, or don’t post on the forums at all. This will obviously drive away a huge number of the best posters on the official forums, making them a worse place than before, even without the spam. What happens when you get redirected to a technical forum to ask a question? I know I’ve had messages from GMs that say, ‘please post on the suggestion forum’, or error messages that say ‘please post on the technical support forum’, what will I do then? If I don’t want to give away my identity I have no choice but to let my thought go unheard.
As such, I don’t see how anyone can agree with this. This goes a LOT LOT deeper than simply stopping spam and trolling on the forums, and in my opinion this could be the start of the fall of WoW if Activision-Blizzard decide to stay on this route.
Alec Meer, Rock Paper Shotgun
Ciderhelm, Tankspot
Long forum post by Natti
E3: Day 1 rundown
Posted by Sam in Gaming, MMO, Multiplayer, Preview, RTS, Shooter, Single Player on 16 June 2010
In addition to Dead Space 2 and Medal Of Honor, some other games have made an appearance at this years E3. Here’s a brief rundown on what’s happened so far.
Portal 2
This has the potential to be the most disappointing announcement during E3. During Sony’s Press Conference yesterday, Valve announced that Portal 2 would be coming to the PS3, along with steam services such as automatic updates and steam cloud technology which will make it the best console version of the game (better than the Xbox360 version, essentially). How a game so dexterous as Portal is supposed to work well with an analogue stick I don’t know, and I don’t really care. They also showed a decent trailer for the game, though it was lacking in the humor of the first one, which is a great shame, I hope they don’t decide to drop the humor from that actual game.
The potentially disappointing part of this announcement is that if this is Valve’s E3 ‘Surprise’, that means no Episode 3, or Half Life 3 at this year’s E3. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what else Valve has in store for us, and personally I doubt that is all they’ve come to show.
Shogun 2: Total War
New screenshots of the latest in the Total War series, Shogun 2, have been released, showing how beautiful the game is. I’ve never really been into the series, I only owned Medieval 2 Total War, but this may rekindle my interest.
Warhammer 40K: Dark Millennium Online
Two years ago, Mythic Entertainment released Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning. It was a good game, but ultimately flawed and failed financially. Vigil Games are now having a crack at the franchise with a 40K MMO, which should be a breath of fresh air for the MMO genre. From first impressions, it looks like players will have Space Marines, Chaos, and Orkz available to them, which brings up some interesting problems such as how do you balance the races, as lore-wise, Space Marines typically fight in small squads of 4-5, while Orkz rely on massive numbers. Screenshots are here here here and here.
Bad Company 2: Vietnam
An odd departure for the incredibly successful modern combat FPS, an expansion taking it back 40 years to Vietnam. Expect a new singleplayer campaign, new multiplayer maps along with new guns and unlocks. Sounds good to me! Along with this announcement was a short teaser.
Star Wars: The Old Republic
I don’t have much information about Bioware’s upcoming Star Wars based MMORPG, but it is Bioware so my hopes are high. Lucas Arts have managed to pull together a fantastic CGI short movie for the game, which you can see below.
Crysis 2
I don’t hold much hope for the sequel to the graphics card melting original Crysis. From what I’ve seen, it’s suffered from the transition from PC exclusive to console, gone are the beautiful vistas and tropical scenery, and in are the common and dreary urban rubble settings you see from many B list console shooters. It still looks spectacular of course, and it may well run a lot better than the original, which would be a good thing, as Crysis is still one of the most graphically intensive games out there.
Also
This post is already long enough, so I’ll just give a brief mention to Brink, a group based multiplayer FPS set in a post-apocalyptic flooded world, and Rage, a FPS and racing game also set in a post-apocalyptic world. I did say brief.
Mindless monster slaying has never been this much fun
It’s never been this cheap either, because this week Torchlight is 50% off in Steam’s Weekend Deal. Personally, Torchlight is one of my top games of 2009. It’s a fantastic example of how simple yet addictive a game can be. I’m not sure if Runic Games falls under the category of and independant development team, but the amount of support they are giving the game is standard of indie principles.
So why is this game so good? Essentially, the game takes the form of a traditional RPG in the same vein of Diablo (to be expected) where the only objective is to battle hordes of enemies in various environments, gaining in power with the end goal of defeating the mega-boss at the end. As I said before, the premise is stupidly simple, but for some reason this simplicity is what makes the game so great. Because you are cleaving through group after group of goblins, kobolds, drakes, wierd cat like creatures, and so on, your brain enters a sort of automatic mode where you can simply focus on the beautiful graphics and maybe listen to music or a podcast in the background
As with all RPGs, one of the most addictive elements is how you ultimately build your character. There are three classes to chose from, falling into the massive stereotypes for the genre, a warrior class, a mage class, and a rogue/ranger class. Each character has three skill trees, must like talents in World Of Warcraft, but you can chose skills from any tree once your level permits. Torchlight also posesses the mandatory enchanting and trading systems so akin to all modern RPGs and MMOs.
To me, Torchlight feels more like a singleplayer MMO than an RPG, which is probably a good thing because Runic Games have plans turn it into just that for free to all existing owners, an exciting prospect to say the least. There is also a demo available on Steam, so you have no reason to check it out before you make your mind up.
Recent Comments