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Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a nice interview up with Turbine producer Jeffrey Steefel, mostly centered on the Lord of the Rings Online forthcoming Mines of Moria expansion — also discussed are things like how Steefel perceives LOTRO's performance, expansion features, and issues of designing for a license. While WoW is wide open, not being tied to anything but itself, LOTRO has slightly more constraints in what can — or should — be done. Steefel doesn't see this as a problem, however: More »
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The rights of 'avatars' — more to the point, the people who control them and their virtual assets — is an interesting and murky part of legal issues, EULAs, and player-company relations. Court cases have been tried over 'illegal' seizing of assets, and with the amount of time (and money) that people pour into their online characters and assets, we can expect to see more and more real-world legal problems related to virtual issues. But are companies on the ball?: More »
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Among everything else going on at the Austin GDC, an interesting panel took place on the issue of changing business models in MMOs — Free To Play has an easy to read, to the point summation of the panel, which included Robert Ferrari of Turbine (LOTRO), Hilmar Veigar Petursson of CCP (EVE Online), Nicolay Nickelsen of Funcom (Age of Conan), and Min Kim of Nexon (MapleStory). Unsurprisingly, it included discussion of the revenue models — subscription versus free to play — as well as potential audiences: More »
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'Tis the season for non-MMO players dipping their toes in the vast MMO waters; the guys at Man vs. Horse have done a bang up look at City of Heroes, EVE Online, and the ubiquitous WoW. It's always looking at veteran gamers coming to a new genre, and the series is a quick, funny, engaging read. It's also given me an idea of what MMOs I won't be trying: More »
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Yesterday, we mentioned the fact that game designers often walk a fine line when figuring out how best to dangle a nice, looty carrot in front of their audience; somewhat on the same subject (loot!), Roger Travis goes back to the Iliad and even further to illustrate some ancient roots of the same thing we see in modern MMOs: grinding, loot, and boss battles, oh my! And really, even that squad you're running end game content with harkens back to an older group of 'heroes': More »
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As a connoisseur of the MMO genre, I've often noticed that your average Chinese and Korean massively multiplayer online games tend to rely heavily on the mouse, often foregoing keyboard movement altogether in favor of the dreaded click-to-move system that I completely despise. So why do Asian MMO games lean so hard on the mouse? Perfect World product manager Jon Belliss believes he's discovered the answer - smoking. More »
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Steve at PlayNoEvil has some interesting analysis up on the current state of gold farming in MMORPGs (though he does admit that since hard stats are difficult to come by, "any analysis is more akin to reading tea leaves"); using data provided by mmobux, he looks at the pricing trends to try and divine what might be going on in the wild world of selling gold: More »
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NCsoft is stepping up the battle against IP theft, in this case targeting illegal servers in eastern Europe (concentrating on Greece and Russia). Last year, they successfully brought a suit against a Greek company who was profiting from the use of illegal Lineage II servers; they're continuing the global fight. Full release after the jump. More »
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It's hard to fault people for being really ambitious, and Joe Ybarra (producer of games ranging from The Bard's Tale to the Matrix Online, and now of Stargate Worlds) certainly sounds ambitious. Ybarra talked to Gamasutra about the problems of licensing IP, the MMO industry today, where Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment is headed. First, though, there's the Stargate MMO to worry about: More »
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Last year, Blizzard decided to go after Glider (the botting program that lets you skip past the grind and get to the good stuff); Michael Donnelly, the guy behind Glider (who has apparently made nearly $2.8 million off of it) is fighting back, and now both sides have filed motions arguing their case. The summary judgment briefs and analysis have been making the rounds the past week or so: Blizzard claims that Glider infringes on the EULA of WoW by copying portions of code and is pissing of WoW players (as well as gobbling up resources), while Glider is saying that grinding to level 70 is boooooring and they're just helping players get to the fun bits. Both sides are seeking to be declared victorious without having to go through a protracted legal battle. We'll see what happens and who comes out on top. More »
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And you thought gold farming was bad. Steve at PlayNoEvil has an interesting analysis up of the next wave of things MMO operators and players will have to worry about: gold frauders. The number of stolen credit cards being used to pay for WoW accounts has led to the UK bank Halifax to block payments to Blizzard, among a few other industry moves to try and deal with the ever-increasing problem of stolen credit cards, illicit RMT transactions, and other money-related issues. What is the problem - and why? More »
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The Chinese game industry is hot hot hot, and money is burning a hole in the pocket of some of the big players like Shanda. Unfortunately, the hot market has led to plenty of companies overvaluing their worth, and despite capital burning a hole in the collective pocket of the big companies, they're starting to realize that snapping up small companies for massive prices isn't the giant payoff they're looking for: More »
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What would modern China be without campaigns? This one's lacking in a snappy name and related propaganda, but the government is gearing up to go after those hotbeds of moral decay, crime, and WoW: internet cafes. Introducing "Operation for Tomorrow," targeting unlicensed websites, internet cafes, and porn. More »
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Danc at Lost Garden has a blast from the past up, in the form of a snip from a talk given by Dani Bunten Berry on good design elements for multiplayer games (all the way back in 1997). It's quite a list, but just goes to show that a lot of good design elements are pretty timeless. More »
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Over at Free To Play, a list of ten potential reasons the free to play model may never take hold in the West like it has in Asia, or at least why it may take a long, long time. It's an interesting roundup of a number of issues facing virtual worlds and some games more broadly (issues with RMT, bad ad campaigns, bad advergaming, etc.) - I'm always interested to see people's attitudes toward the free to play model, which is frequently met with much hostility. One of the most pressing issues is the issue of an onslaught of repetitive MMORPG or virtual space clones: More »
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It's no secret that foreign games, be they WoW or Korean imports, are wildly popular in China - thus, in a clear case of local protectionism, the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) has instituted new regulations to keep out foreign game companies: More »
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Despite governmental efforts to the contrary (gaming addiction 'bootcamps,' time-limiting systems and the like), China's gaming population just refuses to be fenced in. The Chinese market is growing by leaps and bounds, which - unsurprisingly - is making the government just a wee bit skittish. Due to rampant piracy, lack of game ratings, and more illegal internet cafés than you can shake a stick at, the government is worried over reports of rising numbers of gaming addicts (and what they see as a related rise in juvenile crime). Will the fact that previous measures haven't exactly had the desired effects mean that the CCP is going to throw their hands up in defeat? Of course not: More »
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Worlds in Motion has an interesting Q&A up with Susan Choe and Nick Foster of Outspark, a company that has imported games like Fiesta and Secret of the Solstice for US audiences. Outspark has managed to secure $11 million USD in funding from various sources to "help PC-based online games find the same market in North America as they currently enjoy in Asia," and Choe and Foster talk about everything from importing Korean games wholesale, how they put together the project in the first place, and the carpal tunnel inducing process of picking what games to bring over: More »
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Long, long ago, before I threw myself into my current path of East Asian specialist, I was a classicist-in-training with a focus on first century BC Roman lyric poetry. So I read with interest a piece in the Escapist comparing modern MMOs with the epic forerunners of centuries past - the likes of the Illiad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, among others. Anyone who's ever waded through any of the epic classics can relate to the formulaic nature of the stories - epithets abound (Aeneas is always faithful, Achilles is always swift-footed, Dawn is always rosy-fingered), structure is repetitive, stories are familiar. The repetition isn't merely the mark of a lazy story teller (or game developer), oh no: More »
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I was thrilled to come across a most glorious article on Chinese MMORPGs (specifically, the wildly popular Zhengtu Online), translated to English from the original that appeared in the Southern Weekly. As Steve at PlayNoEvil sums it up, "While wimpy Americans can whine about "cheating" in online games, quibble about Real Money Transactions (RMT), complain about gold farming, gripe about power-leveling, and otherwise aspire to a mythical "purity" of game play, the most popular game in China, ZT Online, from Giant Interactive has embraced all of these things.. and online gambling to boot." More »
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Leigh Alexander has an interesting '07 wrap up of sorts that's not a top 10 list, but a look at some of the major trends in gaming this year - which can be summed up in the word 'accessibility,' which she defines as many different things. Making the 'entry barrier' to console gaming low with the Wii; allowing people to play in bite sized chunks instead of hours-long grinds; the line between the gamer and the non-gamer is becoming increasingly slim (maybe?): More »
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While perusing GameSetWatch, I hop skipped my way through a couple of blogs and found myself at a very interesting article in T.H.E. Journal on using MMORPGs in educational contexts, specifically on their use in second language acquisition. And here I've been doing it the old fashioned way all these years! It's a lengthy article, but worth a read through - author John K. Waters talks about a number of studies and approaches to the topic, but all of them are focused on use WoW and its ilk for educational purposes: More »
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Jim Rossignol has some thoughts up over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun on MMO design - a study in why, despite WoW being WoW and 'the' MMORPG in a lot of ways, EVE Online is potentially a better base for future MMO designs. Not in terms of creating a better "PvP-heavy spaceship-centric world," but by applying some of their design principles to games with more mass appeal? The two concepts that Rossignol picks out as being vast improvements over the WoW model are no levels (collecting skills, not level grinding, becomes the object) and money - not XP - would become the driving force in a game. There are some interesting thoughts, but lest you think it's an EVE love fest, he cautions: More »
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Well, the Chinese gaming world is certainly turning into a sue-happy place as of late: CDC Games, the same company that has launched an assault on piracy, is now suing South Korean-based MGame Corporation in both South Korea and Hong Kong. Earlier this week, CDC leveled charges at MGame of providing really crappy tech support for Yulgang, a popular MMORPG, and failing to back up CDC in their quest to end piracy; after filing those suits in Hong Kong, CDC moved on to South Korean courts, alleging MGame breached a contract and failed to provide financial data. While MGame hasn't commented on these charges, CDC notes that MGame has terminated their contract with the company, citing non-payment (oops): More »
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Beijing Perfect World, one of Mainland China's biggest players in the online games market, ran a contest for gamers to put together movies showcasing their idea of 'a perfect world.' The interesting thing is that the winning video actually got aired on China Central Television (the national TV network, better known for all sorts of fantastically dramatic Chinese soap operas - at least, that's what I fondly remember it for). I took a look at several of the prize-winning videos - some of them are obviously more game-related than others - and it's good for quite a bit of entertainment. True to BPW form, the press release is a gem in its own right. Take a look at the winning videos here and find the full release after the jump. More »
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There's an interesting piece up at Terra Nova ruminating on the question of winners and losers in PvP-based games, taking a close look at EVE-Online in particular. Losses can be minimal in a lot PvP games, but the losses can be much harsher in games like EVE-Online - but Nate Combs says that the game has fostered a culture that 'recycles losers' (in a positive way) and helps retain players: More »
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If your life seems to be lacking a certain academic something, Jesper Juul of The Ludologist (among other things) has posted his conference paper from the September Digital Games Research Association international conference in Tokyo. I admit that since I'm backlogged in slogging through lots of other academic reading, I haven't had time to take a close look at it, but how bad could a paper that covers Cooking Mama, Karate Champ, StarCraft and Dead Or Alive 4 be? More »
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This week's "The China Angle," Gamasutra's roundup on what's going on in the wild, wild world of the Mainland Chinese market, leaves behind the urban areas we typically associate with internet cafes and too much time spent with WoW and heads to Yunnan Province, more specifically Shangri-La County (formerly known as Zhongdian County). Despite not having a Starbucks or a McDonald's, the area is relatively wealthy, making it easy to swallow the hourly fees to pay WoW - in China, it's less a matter of geography and more a matter of finances: More »
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It's been a tough year for China's gaming world: intellectual property disputes, internet addiction boot camps, new government regulations, cafes and companies ignoring those new regulations, all punctuated by the occasional death-by-marathon-gaming. NBC has a roundup of this year's events, and brings up the broader issue of government censorship under the guise of keeping tempting materials out of the hands of minors and/or people who are going to game for 3 days straight, then drop dead of a heart attack: More »
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An entry at Terra Nova links to a rather lengthy paper on architecture, space, and gameplay in WoW and Battle for Middle Earth 2. The paper is well worth a read through, but the Terra Nova entry has some choice quotes pulled out for those short on time. The paper concerns itself with how two different games use their spatial organization and architecture - both in terms of buildings and the fundamental design of a game world - to impact play experiences: More »
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A couple of sources (notably Wonderland and GamePolitics) have taken note that a forthcoming paper in The Lancet Infectious Diseases will be taking a look at the World of Warcraft 'Corrupted Blood' plague of 2005. Their purpose? To see how virtual models of epidemics can help real-world research - and they got the perfect case in the WoW plague. Eric Lofgren (Rutgers University) and Nina Fefferman (Tufts University), the two researchers who worked on the paper, say in their abstract: More »
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Shanda is one of China's biggest game operators and while they've been doing well recently (really, really well), they didn't hit their stride for a few years. Chen Tianqiao, former real estate executive and co-founder of Shanda, talked with the Wall Street Journal about what it took to get Shanda off the ground and turn it into one of the dominant companies in the Chinese gaming market (we'll ignore the lawsuits regarding copyright infringement): More »
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Further ensuring that Western gamers will have a hard time escaping the sometimes cool, frequently criticized glut of games coming out of China and other points East, CDC Games - operating 13 games in China - is making plans to expand to the rest of the world through the creation of a new creatively-named subsidiary, CDC Games International (that would be 'CGI' for short). Apparently trying to fast-track their way to global success, they plan to launch some of their free-to-play offerings in the Japanese and North American markets later this year. More »
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The Guardian Unlimited reported on Saturday that Google has "drawn up plans to compile psychological profiles of millions by covertly monitoring the way they play online games". In English, it means that the search engine has registered a new patent that can spy on us. After gathering months of online behavioral patterns, Google could try to make this information available to their advertising overlords for a small fee. More »
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Never say whining doesn't pay off. After I griped yesterday about how Blizzard didn't send me, Florian Eckhardt for god's sakes, a Burning Crusade beta key... guess who got one? That's right. It wasn't God. It wasn't you. It was me. Many thanks to the anonymous Blizzard employee who took pity on me. And, while I'm at it, I'd really like to just bless the entire concept of favoritism in whatever ideal Platonic form it inhabits in the metaphysical realm. More »
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You can tell the current obsessions of Kotaku writers by whatever subject they slavishly follow. For Crecente? It's Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Ashcraft? Spelling console names in Capital Letters. Eliza, of course, posts mostly about Playboy editorials she disagrees with. And me? World of Warcraft. More »
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Yesterday, I spent about 10 hours leveling up my undead rogue from 41 to 43. Today, I am filled with self-loathing. During that period, each muscular cell surrounded itself with 8 protecting cells of a cottage cheese like substance. Under the strain of my expanding rotundity, my chair broke into kindling, and was quickly replaced with a make-shift chair of my own devising made up of beer cans filled with my own urine. More »
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Something interesting is happening in Eve Online, the massive space MMORPG: the largest alliances in the game, Band of Brothers and Ascendant Frontier, have declared war on each other, sucking 9,000 players into the game's first truly massive PvP conflict. Huge battles are taking place for entire systems. And all in a game I once declared the world's prettiest spreadsheet. More »
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I've promised myself that as soon as Burning Crusade comes out, I'm going to reunite my guild made up entirely of undead rogues with Cthulhuesque names ("...and the Holograms") and waste my entire winter playing a game that has never filled me with anything besides self-contempt. More »
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