Category Archives: Uncategorized

Industry analysts expressed surprise at this news

It’s official: per CFO Eric Brown, during an earnings conference call, SWTOR is making a lot of money, with 1.7m subscribers (which Brown went to an unusual effort to quantify correctly as a mix of paying customers and customers with billing information entered but still on free trial) and over 2m sell-through (copies sold to actual customers as opposed to sitting on store shelves).

Brown said EA was actually able to add a lot more users on a per-server basis, thanks to some technical improvements. He also noted that about 40% of the units of the game sold during the quarter went over the company’s Origin digital-distribution channel, which is not tracked by market researchers such as NPD.

“This has been the most rapid scaling of an MMO ever, based on our research,” Brown commented.

EA stock rose sharply as a result, pleasing Hutts everywhere. SWTOR is now firmly in place as the #2 MMO, in both earnings and subscribers. It’s now up to Bioware to follow through on that with retention.

I claim EQ in the name of the GNOLLS

Everquest 1 going free-to-play.

With the announcement, the frozen-in-amber separate EQMac server is also going away, which disappointed the people who preferred EQ frozen in amber.

Nothing more than rumor at this point.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/TheKevinDent/status/158454172239409152
Kotaku detailing above leak: http://kotaku.com/5876253/thq-wipes-out-games-planned-for-2014-to-ready-itself-for-sale-says-insider

The Vigil-developed THQ-published MMO has had a very long and by all accounts troubled development history but was closing in on eventual release. However it’s rapidly becoming clear that the space for sub-$100M budget releases by large publishers is becoming very tiny indeed.

Update: THQ denies the rumor.

A Congressman stops by to post in your official forums

tl;dr: If you’re looking for The Banned Of Lum the Mad Tom Chick forum it’s over here.

Quarter to Three is a forum I have posted on quite often over the past decade (yes, that long). It’s a forum loosely based on gaming with a literate group of followers, founded by two fairly clueful gaming writers, Mark Asher and Tom Chick. Mark eventually drifted away and Tom took over full time.

There was the usual drama, as often goes with such things. Earlier this year Tom had clearly had enough and turned the forum essentially unmoderated.  A lot of previously unbanned users came back, and some people took advantage of the Lord of the Flies atmosphere to run riot.

Obviously this was unsustainable for an enterprise that actually costs someone a non-zero amount of money to host, so Tom announced that he would be returning to moderator status, and then today posted a thread that said in so many words, “Yep, I’m back, and a lot of you are on notice, and this gaggle of people that can’t stand my moderation are gone period.” Some were surprised by this list, both by its inclusions (some apparently were only included for vocally disagreeing with choices Tom had made) and its exclusions (the worst offenders of the previous months of unmoderation were pointedly not in the “You’re gone NOW” list). The obvious conclusion was that Tom’s first action was to simply get rid of the people that got on his nerves, a conclusion that Tom later tried, with some effort but not complete success, to disprove.

It’s safe to say I would do things differently – and I suspect the suspects complaining would complain more with my method, which is less soul-searching “look, here’s all the people I don’t like, let’s talk about it here” and more “while you weren’t looking yesterday three people were shot in the head. MOVE ON CITIZEN”. Like Tom, I am a firm believer in the This-Is-My-Living-Room-You-Yutz theory of forum moderation – if I don’t want you around, you’re not around, and no, you don’t get a vote. If you don’t like it, well, you know, you do have a living room.

So given all that, why did I make a refugee camp for people recently banned and looking for shelter? Well, mainly because it was needed and I had a forum I wasn’t using. I agreed with some of the names on Tom’s list of People Shot In The Head, disagreed with others. This is entirely normal, given that my name isn’t Tom and it’s not my forum. And again, while I believe I would have handled things differently, I don’t disagree that’s entirely his prerogative to handle things the way in which he deems best.

As one of the admins of Quarter to Three put it, “I find it endlessly ironic that Lum himself is setting up a “banned of lum the mad” type-site. It’s the circle of life!” And so it is. As I said, I mainly did this as a short term favor for people hit by surprise by The Great Bannination Of 2012. I just got word that Matt Gallant (another Banned of Tom the Chick whom I respect and whose contributions I valued far more than others left standing) is setting up his own refugee camp of sorts at his own site. I certainly have better things to do than hold the hands of whiny forum babies, maybe he’s not that busy!

In any event, it’s a series of events rich with irony, pathos, and unintended humor, much like Rick Santorum winning a caucus.

10: Catherine

Catherine was a game whose core gameplay was awful (essentially a very twiddly platform game). And you didn’t care because the game itself was so compelling. Japan is a society that takes adult games seriously (and by that I mean games with mature themes, not Jenna Jameson Modern Warfare 4) and thus we get games like Catherine, which start as a rumination on love and regret and veers into very weird places. Pity about the actual gameplay!

9: Fallout: New Vegas

Fallout 3 was very awesome – as someone who lived in the DC area for a few years it was pretty nifty actually recognizing the post-apocalyptic wreckage of many places I was familiar with,  not to mention just being a great game in general. But it was very much apart from the canon established by Fallout and Fallout 2. Fallout: NV, on the other hand, very much was Fallout 3 in all but name. The only two problems with it: wacky instability when it shipped, and the fact that the timeline has moved so far in the future that Fallout 4 is kind of pointless without some sort of license reboot.

8: Hatoful Boyfriend

Hatoful Boyfriend is a romance simulator where you compete for the attention of pigeons. I don’t need to go any further.

7: Bastion

Lum added Bastion as number 8 on this list. Lum didn’t know what else to say other than it was a really good game and that adding a dynamic narrator to a rogue-like was a work of genius. Thank you, Lum.

6: Portal 2

Like any sequel it wasn’t as OMG WHAT as the original and the gameplay itself started to drag near the end but it still had great writing and the best rant ever put into a video game.

5: Dungeons of Dredmor

Best Use Of Necronomiconomics As A Gameplay Mechanic 2011. This is a very silly game that you should be playing. It’s fun! It’s hardcore! You need the lutefisk for the lutefisk god!

4:  Kaiserreich for Darkest Hour

This will take some explanation. Darkest Hour is a fan-made iteration of the ever-Lum-praised Hearts of Iron 2. Part of its feature set is support for fan mods. The most well-concieved mod for Darkest Hour is a game called Kaiserreich. Kaiserreich postulates a 1936 world where – stop me if I lose you – Germany wins World War 1, the Whites win the Russian Civil War, Communist revolutions overthrow the governments of France (who takes refuge in Algeria) and Britain (who takes refuge in Canada), Hermann Goering sets up a petit empire in the former Belgian Congo Mittlelafrika, Austria-Hungary is finally about to fall apart, the United States is about to be riven in dueling revolutions between the Communists of Jack Reed, the Fascists of Huey Long, and the military coup led by Douglas MacArthur, and Russia can go in any of four different wild directions from a Communist takeover to a Czarist revival. And it works.

3: All The Games I Should Have Played But Didn’t Have Time But Heard Were Really Good.

You know, Dark Souls, Arkham City, Saints Row 3. I’ll get to them. Eventually.

2: Skyrim

Skyrim is the latest version of The Bethesda Game – you know, the one they keep making ever since Daggerfall (trivia: my first foray into games writing was a walkthrough/support site for Daggerfall). This one, they got right. Skyrim really is a non-linear fantasy simulator that is utterly epic in every way and there is almost no wasted space. It really should be the #1 entry in this list and they really are pretty interchangeable at this point.

1: Star Wars: The Old Republic

Yes, the developers and inside baseball commenters will be debating throughout 2012 whether EA has literally moved the barrier of entry into MMO development into the level of small countries’ gross national product with the sheer thunderclap scale of investment that SWTOR represented. But let’s not let that detract from what SWTOR accomplished: storytelling in an MMO that works as the center point of the game. Also, lightsabers. SWTOR is fun. SWTOR is incredible amounts of fun, while redefining what an MMO is. Is it really an MMO when a game essentially is a Star Wars game that millions of people are playing at the same time? Who cares… it’s fun. Games are supposed to be fun, and SWTOR gets that – a point too many MMO developers have forgotten.

I’ve gone ahead and switched the internal blog commenting system back on. The forums will stick around in their current woefully ignored state (I’ll probably need them for something else eventually) but I haven’t had the time to integrate them fully into WordPress as I planned to, so they tend to be more of a hindrance to commenting on things for all save the hardest of core.

“We meant to do better, but it came out as always.” - Viktor Chernomyrdin, typically cheerful Russian politician

All Sanya Weathers stalkers please update your Foursquare apps: she’s no longer a Tera forum moderator. (Did you know she was a Tera forum moderator? Neither did they!)

Apparently she has something new coming up involving hardcore PvP show tunes. (which. um. I’d be all over. Just sayin’.)

Guardian: Chinese labor camps using slave labor to farm for gold in WoW

“Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”

Memories from his detention at Jixi re-education-through-labour camp in Heilongjiang province from 2004 still haunt Liu. As well as backbreaking mining toil, he carved chopsticks and toothpicks out of planks of wood until his hands were raw and assembled car seat covers that the prison exported to South Korea and Japan. He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.

But it was the forced online gaming that was the most surreal part of his imprisonment. The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real.

“If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,” he said.

There are several independent things that are very, very wrong about this.