April 2006 Entries
Ding!:
From Stratics
Jeska Linden just announced that Second Life has reached the 200,000 account milestone. Keep up the good work, Linden Labs! To give you an idea of just how much SL has grown, this press release from January 5th, 2005 marks the 100,000 account milestone. More details to come later.
~ moo
I'm sorry...how many in how long? 100k accounts in about five months seems like quite an achievement at first glance, but this most high profile of online construction kits has often drawn disapproving glances on matters of subscription number, largely down to it's 'Basic' and 'Premium' account options.
Compare the above...
My continuing search for the real EVE Online, err…continues, with my application and signing-up with one of the many player corporations advertising on the in-game Recruitment chat channel. The channel itself is a bit of an odd place, regularly showing more than 300 people, all of whom seem to spend much of their time spamming rather generic recruitment adverts over and over, bitching at each other for spamming too much, and subsequently arguing so vehemently that they don’t notice those few players who actually do seem to be looking for a corp to join.
Determined to get started on the bigger...
Looks like we're needed!
Mischiefblog: MMO Survey (found via Nerfbat)
I'm a sucker for surveys, and can usually milk an entire blog post out of my answers! It seems the only people who have filled in the survey in any appreciable numbers is the entire player-base of World War II Online, which is going to make for somewhat bizzarre reading in any context I suspect. So in an effort to prevent Advanced MMO Theory papers being written from the first-hand experiences of Squadron Leader Fossington-Smythe and Generalfeldmarschall Von Trapp, head on over and tell them a bit about your game. Fill out...
Well, that’s new:
Auto Assault: Veteran’s Awards (Found via OGRank)
Bonus loot drops for block bookings, it seems. Another day, another experimental Additional Revenue Stream, I guess. Auto Assault is only a few days old and already it has Veterans, which seems rather odd. Still, I it was only a matter of time, and it’s already the commonly done thing to give away special shineys for pre-orders, and indeed, an Auto Assaultist who preordered and then stumps up for six months worth of motorised mayhem now gets +2% cash drops, +2% loot drops and +7% chance of the loot being magical…er…’enhanced’. They...
Oooh...back from the dead!:
MMOGChart.com: April 11 Update
And I thought SirBruce was gone forever! The charts go to Nov-05 now, and more updates promised. For want of proper numbers, which people rarely give out, it's an interesting read. Looks like it was a good few months for EVE Online, Second Life, Puzzle Pirates, RuneScape, Final Fantasy XI, and of course World of Warcraft. Not so good a quarter for Lineage, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, The Sims Online, Anarchy Online, Shadowbane and Horizons. It does rather seem World of Warcraft has in fact pulled new gamers from thin air, rather than, as...
It’s back to EVE, and the usual process of trying to remember how to play. Forewarned by previous experience, I’m making sure I ease back into the NPC Agent missions a bit more gingerly this time, and started from scratch with Frigate based Agent 1 missions. As it turned out I hadn’t forgotten quite that much, and am now comfortably grinding away on Agent 2 Crusier-based missions and working at faction standing in the hopes of opening up a new line of Agent 3 leads. My usual Agent 3 people are on the other side of the galaxy, and it...
From the post-bag:
Hi there.
I also stumbled across your blog, a couple of times infact, during my sad trawling expeditions for Raider Wars.
A little while ago I snapped, and now I'm modding Allegiance into Raider Wars. Since this blog is like the only active site except mine that has anything to do with RW anymore, I decided to spam it. Watch... !
You can see the ongoing results of my delirious crusade here: Raider Wars: Epilogue
Whee! Wasn't that fun?
-phreec
A comment in response to this previous post.
Not only am I going to hold off the ever-vigilant comment-thread spam-pocalypse cleansing fire, I thought this...
Well, with my resubscription to EVE Online, something else had to go. In any event, I wonder if playing four different online games at once is at all healthy, or indeed feasible. My current smorgasbord tendencies with MMOs mean that I end up skimming a lot of titles, but not actually getting anywhere in any of them.
It’s probably a commitment thing. I like variety, certainly, but many MMOs seem to punish people who like that. It’s gotten better in recent years certainly, but at their core, the majority still have a basic repetition exercise as their main way of progressing...
Meanwhile, in EVE Online…
Kill Ten Rats: No Longer Blue
You can’t help but admire an attitude like that; ‘We have decided the game is boring…we are going to make it more interesting by declaring war on everyone!’ Player content, I guess. Certainly big news if you live next door to the bit of space Band of Brothers have carved out for themselves, but for most it’s just another interesting news item that is unlikely to matter to them personally – like some overseas war.
My rather loose touch on EVE politics suggests that BoB do actually have the numbers and skills to...
Shocking collection of print-screen dumps over at n3rfed!
n3rfed: Carnival of Gamers Online
It's this kind of practice that means I try to avoid saying, or doing, anything online ever. You never know when last night's ill-advised confession is likely to become tomorrow's general forum hilarity, thanks to the magic of the 'Prt Scr' button. Nothing to fear from the above link though - it's actually a very clever format for presenting the...er...thirteenth Carnival of Gamers! Go see, but as usual the standrard warnigs apply: If you alt-tab while in a hectic courtyard defense on Esamir, you deserve what you get. Best...
We’re a few weeks in to the Planetside: Reserves thing now, and it does look to have been something of a success. Both anecdotally, and from my own experience, numbers seem to be significantly up, with two continent locks a frequent sight now, and substantial fighting on a third – something not seen since shortly after initial release over two years ago. However, it is worth noting that originally Planetside had five servers, instead of today’s three, and that the number of players required to lock a continent used to be somewhere around 500, rather than today’s 400. Still, the...
Well, now that the self-congratulatory orgy of smugness that is ‘April Fool’s Day’ is over, one can start looking at MMO news and believing it again, which is always nice. Plus by now, anyone not trying the Planetside: Reserves thing is probably a bit bored of my witterings by now, so I went and had a trawl in the Second Life ‘Land and Economy’ forum, which is always a good source of MMO ‘Whaaaa?’.
It’s a forum full of equal parts of People Who Take RMT VERY seriously, and People Who Like To Take The Piss, and is ever a fractious...