n3rfed

SAGA OF THEMIS

So it seems the Themis Group has been dropped from another MMO. Visions of Anarchy Online, Jumpgate and Wish spring to mind. The sometimes cited whitepaper written by Sir Bartle aside, has the Themis Group had any success with MMOs? Perhaps more interestingly, how the heck are these guys staying in business?

NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL LARPING

Only a couple of days after this, one of my local newspapers is reporting the latest incident in a series of real-life PKs. For those who don't want to sell their soul to the Australian Prime Minister in order to view the article, here it is:

Online gamer killed for selling virtual weapon

By Amalie Finlayson and Reuters

March 30, 2005 - 2:08PM 

A Shanghai online game player has stabbed to death a competitor who sold his cyber-sword, the China Daily said.

The incident creates a dilemma in China where no law exists for the ownership of virtual weapons.

Qiu Chengwei, 41, stabbed competitor Zhu Caoyuan repeatedly in the chest after he was told Zhu had sold his "dragon sabre", used in the popular online game Legend of Mir 3, the newspaper said a Shanghai court was told yesterday.

Legend of Mir 3 features heroes and villains, sorcerers and warriors, many of whom wield enormous swords.

Qiu and a friend jointly won their weapon last February, and lent it to Zhu who then sold it for 7,200 yuan ($A1,129), the newspaper said.

Qui went to the police to report the "theft" but was told the weapon was not real property protected by law.

"Zhu promised to hand over the cash but an angry Qui lost patience and attacked Zhu at his home, stabbing him in the left chest with great force and killing him," the court was told.

The newspaper did not specify the charge against Qiu but said he had given himself up to police and already pleaded guilty to intentional injury.

More online gamers were seeking justice through the courts over stolen weapons and credits, the newspaper said.

"The armour and swords in games should be deemed as private property as players have to spend money and time for them," Wang Zongyu, an associate law professor at Beijing's Renmin University of China, was quoted as saying.

Other experts called for caution. "The 'assets' of one player could mean nothing to others as they are by nature just data created by game providers," a lawyer for a Shanghai-based internet game company was quoted as saying.

Virtual gaming is fast becoming a very popular worldwide trend. Games such as Legend of Mir 3 are known as "massively multi-player online role-playing games" (or MMORPGs).

The worlds created in them are incredibly detailed, and can develop and change even when players are off line.

They have attracted an enormous amount of subscribers and, according to a report in the Australian Financial Review, gamers are attracted to them because they have overcome the biggest problem in traditional computer games: loneliness.

Games writer Jason Hill said that while MMORPGs make up only a tiny percentage of the virtual gaming market, those who do play them tend to be very dedicated, spending a lot of time in these cyber-worlds.

"The actual items in the games, be they property or tools, become valuable because of the time people have spent building them up," he said.

"In a lot of games people might have to forage for the raw materials and then take them to a smelter [if they were making a sword or sabre, for example], otherwise the item might be a reward for completing a difficult quest.

"All of that means the item will be difficult to get, and the popularity of these games among certain groups means that these items then become very valuable."

Legend of Mir 3 has not yet been released in Australia. MMORPG enthusiasts here are more likely to be playing the very popular Everquest, or a new contender, World of Warcraft.

"These two are both fantasy games, with a niche appeal, but when people get into it they really get into it," Jason Hill explained.

The case of Qiu Chengwei and Zhu Caoyuan follows a report in the Australian Financial Review over the Christmas break, which told how 22-year-old University of Sydney graduate, David Storey, bought a virtual island - for $35,000 - on December 14 last year.

The island included an abandoned castle, some beautiful beaches ready for development and the potential for the development of lucrative hunting and mining industries. However, it only exists in cyberspace, inside a multi-player computer game called Project Entropia.

Now that Storey owns the island, if any other players visit it for a spot of hunting or a bit of a mine, he is entitled to a percentage of their takings. Every month, for the next twelve months, he can sell five plots of land on his island, which could net him as much as $40,000.

Over at Terranova the beards try to throw something academic into the mix by asking "Does the word 'virtual' have any meaning now?"

Does someone want to break it to them that;

1) According to the Chinese police, yes it still has meaning.
2) This incident doesn't prove that virtual items do or should attract real world laws. This is a case of one dysfunctional person killing someone else because aforementioned someone else's actions negatively impacted him. People have been killed, beaten, maimed and slaughtered for lesser things. More discussion, like in one of those crazy things called a court of law, is needed before people can get giddy about attributing a real legal value to their Pantaloons of +3 Pwness.

Back to the story, a Chinese jail and sentence is the least of Qiu Chengwei's worries. The real shit is going to hit the fan when Zhu Caoyuan gets back from his corpse run.

THE BEST THING ABOUT BEING RICH IS THE EXPENSIVE CRACK

Blizzard continues to dish out free playtime and excuses this week as more players were unable to send their camped loot along to IGE and eBay winners.

A two day extension was followed by a letter from Blizzard Grand Poobah, Mike Morhaime, which offered another free day and free rested experience to those players on affected servers. Level 60s cried about getting nothing, decided eventually to go on a raid, and were all locked out of the instance.

Due to the increase in downtime caused by today’s hardware maintenance, we will be giving all players with characters on the realms listed below a one-day time extension. In addition, players on the realms below will also receive a rested experience bonus, whether or not they had left their characters logged out at an Inn.

We realize that this extended downtime is very inconvenient, but it is a necessary step for us to take in our efforts to increase performance and stability on these realms. For the last few weeks, these realms have experienced poor stability during peak times, which resulted in NPCs not spawning, lag, and frequent disconnects. We have determined that a large percentage of realms on the same backend infrastructure were operating at maximum capacity. This overpopulation caused problems with the service that ultimately led to the issues mentioned above.

Our first step in trying to alleviate the situation was to offer character transfers to reduce the amount of players on these high-population realms. The character transfers did reduce the total amount of players on the shared infrastructure, and we noticed an immediate performance increase. However, this increase only lasted a few days, as populations continued to rise.

Once it was shown that the character transfers did not sufficiently disperse the population, we began to modify the hardware backend for the affected realms. The most recent and substantial step of that process involved transferring the realm data to a new hardware setup. The goal of this procedure is to decrease the overall load on the infrastructure that the affected realms share.

The new hardware infrastructure was completed yesterday, and we are currently copying the character data from eight of these realms onto the new hardware. This transfer will significantly decrease the load on the current infrastructure, which should result in improved performance on all of the realms listed below. The data transfer is taking us longer than expected, but it is vital for providing stability to these realms.

We are totally committed to providing our players with the best play experience possible, and we will continue to streamline our code and add new hardware to our infrastructure until we accomplish that goal. We once again thank you for your patience during this time, and wish you continued good fortunes on your adventures in Azeroth!

Please note that this time extension discussed above is in addition to the two-day time extension announced yesterday that is being provided to players on all realms.

Sincerely,
Mike Morhaime
President, Blizzard Entertainment

List of affected realms:

• Alleria
• Argent Dawn
• Arthas
• Azgalor
• Blackhand
• Bleeding Hollow
• Bloodhoof
• Durotan
• Elune
• Garona
• Hellscream
• Illidan
• Lothar
• Magtheridon
• Mannoroth
• Medivh
• Sargeras
• Shattered Hand
• Skullcrusher
• Stormrage
• Stormreaver
• Warsong
• Whisperwind
• Zul'jin

Ordinn, the rarest of the Community Team, showed up for some work and attempted to further explain details about the free experience.

In order to apply this rest state bonus to all players, we will need to bring all realms down for approximately three hours, beginning at 3:00 AM PST, Thursday March 31.

Bringing down servers to compensate for downed servers? Niiiiice.

Of course, the above time is primetime for myself and those other drunken bastards in Australia. When can we expect the servers to come down again to compensate us for this compensation?

SMORGASBORD, DESSERT

Fresh from my sold-out stint as an Asian gold farmer in the off-Broadway smash-hit "A Phat Loot Drop Named Desire", I bring to you a case of the news olds.

Mourning developers figured their game was cooked and instead offered potential players the promised fun and drama through their message board.

Rather than spouting off more verbal diarrhea about how Everquest subscription numbers continue to amaze and astonish, a different tone is presented through the merging of a further 36 servers. Subscription numbers without the false hit of a Station Pass plzthxk?

Meanwhile, SOE has acted upon its promise and now actually owns a first-born. Reports of the parents being sent full chainmail bikinis accompanied by notes that state "...for her to grow into" from hordes of Mom's-basement-dwellers have yet to be refuted.

Suckers should sign up here. Remember kids, they have 8.2 million subscribers worldwide, including 500,000 in North America. And Paris Hilton plays it too!

Larry Probst acts shocked about the success of World of Warcraft (or is he actually serious? Hello, McFly. This success wasn't hard to miss). Attempts to lay the blame for EA's share price drop firmly at the feet of Blizzard. Plans to jump on this whole "MMO bandwagon thing" and make millions. Oh, wait.

WoW reaches 1.5 million subscribers. 1.5 million people experience the first content patch in over a quarter of a year. 1.5 million people find out exactly why Blizzard was putting off a content patch for over a quarter of a year. It is not clear whether this 1.5 million includes husbands claiming to their wives that their hotel porno channel charges are WoW subscriptions.

April 1 comes early in the form of a WoW expansion announcement. Blizzard creates more rumors by not moving to crush all original rumors.

Star Wars: Galaxies finally acknowledges its HAM system was fundamentally flawed by doing away with the silly thing in the Combat Upgrade. Lesser silly thing is instead put in place.

Vivendi Universal is dumped from the Middle Earth Online project, leaving Turbine to self-publish it. Someone seems to have forgotten Turbine has to look to SOE for help with getting its games to sell.

The Matrix Online has been launched. Hardly a "Woah" to be heard. Plenty of "OMG. Buggggged." to go around.

Gamespy and Terranova ponder the top 10 current trends in MMOGs. Between customer service giving me the crooked middle finger and Loly camping my hunting spots, I'm fresh out of ideas. So instead, read about why UO had the bestest trends evar! Beeyotch.

THOSE POOR LOW POPULATION SERVERS NEVER SAW IT COMING

8:03pm. I read that Blizzard will indeed offer server transfers.

8:05pm. I get thrown from my server as it crumbles into a pile of flaming silicon. Again.

You think someone's trying to tell me something?

HE MAY BE SMILING, BUT HE'LL KICK YOUR SISSY DRUID ASS

Glad to see you striving for a high level of quality with Thottbot there, IGE.

HE'S NOT THE MESSIAH. HE'S A VERY NAUGHTY BOY.

After yesterday's episode of The Dumb & The Restless on the WoW forums, Tigole has had the rear of his +5 pantaloons smacked.

Calandryll, I suggest you'd better make friends with those fans that power Turbine real quick.

BUT THE REAL QUESTION IS, ARE THEIR SERVERS AS BROKEN AS THE REAL ONES?

It was only a matter of time until someone tried creating an emulated WoW server.

LIKE COMMUNITY MANAGERS PASSING IN THE NIGHT

The official Star Wars: Galaxies forum is announcing that Director of Community Relations, Calandryll, has left SOE.

We would like to announce that Jon "Calandryll" Hanna has left our team and is moving back to the east coast to be closer to his family.  As a result of Jon’s departure Diane "Tiggs" Migliaccio has assumed the role of Director of Community Relations for Star Wars Galaxies.  We wish Jon well and congratulate Tiggs on her new role!

What JustG fails to mention is that Calandryll's family is apparently a very new family in the form of Turbine Entertainment.

Just give me a chance to get situated here. Between the move, getting to know all of the projects, and learning to drive in the snow again, I've got a lot on my plate.

A case of new hotness versus old and busted, or this mythical thing called a family actually exists? I mean, come on. The word "family" seems so made up. Pfft.

In other news, Gordon Walton has been found. Jimmy Hoffa wept.

ALL PLAYERS ARE EQUAL. SOME ARE JUST MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

Well, this thread ought to prove entertaining. And when I say entertaining I mean "Poke my eyes out with your fingernail now. Please."

While this kind of information should be reposted on an official board without players finding it first, you've got to wonder what kind of fit would occur if these people stumbled across Corpnews, F13 or Grimwell - sites where developers have dropped by from time to time to comment on their own games (I submit the fit would involve frothing at the mouth).

Hell, even I got an email from the Almighty Smed. Where's my deserved hate?