As I have stated before, I’m back to healing on my druid Elunamakata; it’s really my favorite thing to do on her…if the content is challenging. Well Kurby is always up for a challenge! He has started us in challenge … Continue reading →
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Dueling MMOs of the week: WoW and GW2
With LOTRO in my rear view mirror, the past week has been filled with WoW and GW2. In WoW, my human Warrior hit 65 and is moving his way through Outland. I’m through the starter area of Hellfire, past the … Continue reading →
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Character Transfer Diservice
I picked a server a bit over a year ago, after consulting with three bloggers who I knew were playing the game. All recommended the same server and even the same bloggers’ guild. The third party stats sites guesstimated that the server was …
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slow ride through Wildermore
Looking East from Wildermore LOTRO: I finally was able to take in the content released with Update 11: Wildermore (some spoilers from here on). Mea Culpa: I made a rookie mistake when…about 3/4 of the way through the zone, I … Continue reading →
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Does sex sell games?
Having now watched two of the Tropes in video gaming series, which should be at least interesting to everyone unless you are a sexist asshole (if you are, piss off). I realised that the writing and questing in mmo’s is is actually pretty none misogynistic compared to the general game market. From WoW to Neverwinter to LOTRO it is all remarkably gender neutral plotting. Hell half of the Guild Wars 2 narrative super team Destiny’s Edge are female.
It made me feel a little less ashamed of being a bloke when I thought of this, but then the internet kicked me in the balls with the reminder that mmo’s can be shamefully sexist. MMO armour for females even in games like GW2 and WoW can be pretty damn skimpy, and then I remembered the likes of Scarlet Blade exists. This being a game that takes the sex sells approach of having entirely female characters with giant boobs wearing pretty much nothing. Not that I am convinced that with games sex does sell.
Hell Second Life players can literally make their characters have sex with each other, but that game hasn’t got anywhere near the number of players other, “non interactive” mmo’s have. I certainly think that while sex can certainly play a part in a game narrative (I have blogged about this before), using it as an actual selling point is crass and perhaps more importantly not that successful. We are living in the modern connected age were pictures and video of exotic (and down right weird) sexual material are merely a couple of clicks away, so why would anyone chose to play a third rate mmo (or other game) with naked women in, over a quality game with (mostly) clothed females.
I actually had a Lady Death skin for my Saints Row The Third (a fairly equal opportunity smutty game) character, but ended up turning it off as it was distracting.Humm I haven’t gotten off track a little. I guess what I am saying is that pornography serves a purpose, a purpose that games don’t need to try and squeeze into (pun totally intended). There is no harm putting sex into games for narrative purposes, but I don’t need to see acres of flesh on every character to enjoy a game.
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This is not your Father’s Azeroth
So I’ve come back to playing “World of Warcraft, after a few years away, mostly because I was curious as to the changes Blizzard have made to the game in that time. The last time I spent any real amount of time in WoW was from the Closed Beta for “Cataclysm” until about a month [...]
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Financial Incentives And WoW Daily Burnout
Recent thought-provoking posts have got me pondering whether MMO’s got to the mixed place where they are today because the people making them were not sufficiently careful in what they wished for. Specifically:
Rohan wrote a thought-provoking po…
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Rift Goes Pay-For-Others
Rift’s newly announced “Free-to-Play” relaunch was so obvious that even I saw it coming. One of their more interesting decisions harnesses an emerging trend in payment models – turning the traditional RMT incentive structure on its head with a sy…
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Played League of Legends, there were no lol’s
League of Legends is pretty popular, or so the numbers say. 40 million odd accounts and a million people playing at any given time. I have always been a bit put off from trying it though, for two reasons. One being that it has a notoriously abrasive player base, and that there is a lot to learn and master in the game (these two are probably related). However, at Hex’s urging, we gave it a go. We took the wussy option and set up a 5v5 game versus the AI bots, with three random players on our side, with the difficulty firmly set to beginner.
Suffice to say that 20 minutes later and me and Hex are struggling to hold our own, let alone win. Face with another 20 minutes or so of slowly losing, and being quite bored by this time, we reach the decision, quite easily, to log out and play Diablo 3 instead. On exiting we get a severe warning from the game, stating quitting a match results in a temporary ban. We have no problem with this, as it seems pretty damn unlikely we play it again.
It is safe to say they we have both given up on LoL and Moba’s in general. I certainly don’t have the patience to play (and lose) potentially hundred of games in order to get good. That is a lot of time, literally days of play. It does make me wonder how so many people managed to get into it in the first place. It takes a certain type of determination to overcome the odds and become good, hell even just competitive.
Then it hits me, I have seen that kind of determination before, in World of Warcraft. I have seen people in raids try and try to defeat bosses, and get killed time and time again and keep on trying. And as my recent final (probably, not guaranteeing anything) WoW quitting shows, I don’t have the patience for it. But I also get why people do it. I have felt the wave of joy and satisfaction that finally bringing down a hard boss brings. It is a feeling that not many non gamers would experience. I would imagine that winning your first competitive LoL match would bring on a similar joygasm. Perhaps that is why the occasional very difficult game always finds a following, the harder the game the greater the climax. Hence the abrasive nature of LoL’s players, if you mess up and your side loses, you are depriving your team mates of their hit.
Wow I have implied that gaming is addictive and used them to metaphor sex, nice.
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Incentives Driving 3-Month MMO Tourism
Psychochild has a post up suggesting that the current churn amongst MMO’s can be blamed on soloing – he phrases it more diplomatically, but his identified cause of the problem is that people are not forming community “social fabric” because they are no…
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Incentives Driving 3-Month MMO Tourism
Psychochild has a post up suggesting that the current churn amongst MMO’s can be blamed on soloing – he phrases it more diplomatically, but his identified cause of the problem is that people are not forming community “social fabric” because they are no…
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Mid-April Outlook
It’s been a few months since I posted a round-up/outlook post, though I suppose some of what I’ve been doing can be inferred from what I’ve been posting about.
I finally got back to the level cap in WoW a few weeks back, and I’m not opposed in p…
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Re-Capping Pandaria
I stopped what I was doing to go get the last chunk of exp from a pet battle daily. It seemed appropriate.
My mage finally hit level 90 in World of Warcraft, reaching the new expansion’s cap roughly six months after its release. I had sa…
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Are expansions worth the money?
With Star Wars: The Old Republic releasing it’s first expansion in 10 days time I thought it was time that I looked at getting it. Looking at how much bang you get for your bucks, it seems like a decent deal. In fact it’s one of the better expansion deals as of late. With this […]
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Rise of Massively Multiplayer Online Gameplay Anthologies (MMOGA’s)?
Blizzard’s newly announced Hearthstone online card game is neither new to Blizzard (which has had a paper card game for years) nor online games (SOE has had online card games playable in several of its MMO’s for years). It is a natural fit for a …
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Mini-Guide: Pet Family Counters
I’m not generally in the guide-writing business, but the following is information I was collecting anyway, so I figured I might as well share. If you want a more general guide to WoW Pet Battle families, you can read one at Warcraft Pets or liste…
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Farewell To Pet Battle Forfeit?
Gaming has been derailed by various real life, and as a result I’ve been back at work on Pet Battles after a brief visit to actually playing World of Warcraft proper. I’ve been focusing on an incentive which will be going away in patch 5.2, possi…
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Translating the Ring: LOTRO Classes
These few write ups are intended to help new players starting out in Lord of the Rings Online, but I’m also hoping a few older players will find it helpful as well.
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About FTW
Welcome everyone to a new blog. Before I go into any sort of specifics, I just thought I would introduce myself and give you some background as to what I like to do with my spare time and possibly what I will be writing about and my direction I’m hoping to take this new project [...]
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Mixed Early Thoughts On Pandaria
When my initial impressions of WoW’s Pandaria expansion were primarily negative, I made a conscious decision to hold judgement – and not post on the blog – while I tried to figure out why.
I knew some portion of the issue was a disruption to my …
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