News For Lunch 8/4/08

This is something new I’m going to try to impose some structure on my bloggery. I expect it to last about 3 days or so. It’s a wrapup of the day’s MMO news by noon Central, in bite-sized portions for your reading pleasure. I liked doing it a lot when I wrote lumthemad.net, because it wasn’t much work. ANYWAY.

MORE ABOUT GOLD FARMING THAN YOU EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER WANTED TO KNOW Courtesy of Terra Nova and someone who had a great idea about making their research paper involve World of Warcraft: “Gold Farming”: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games

FINALLY, GOVERNMENT ON YOUR SIDE Illinois mandates that MMOs have to have a nice clear cancel button on their web site for when you, you know, want to cancel.  This was done when an Illinois state legislature tried to cancel his son’s Final Fantasy XI account and got hung up on the “come to the Square Enix offices in person, riding a chocobo” step. Thanks to the Internet not having an easy way to distinguish which customers are not in Illinois, expect all MMOs to remove the jumping-through-hoops thing soonest.

GREENSKINS WILL EAT YOUR BANDWIDTH AND/OR PUDDING Mythic puts up a webgame called “Road To War”, which allows you to do various things. I’d say more, but right now the various things it lets you do include seeing a “we’re sorry, our server died from ALL YOU BORED CUBICLE PEOPLE COMING AT ONCE” screen. Note that by the time you read this, it will probably be up and make me look like a blithering idiot, which is fine, because apparently you can get custard. More webgames should give you custard.

That’s it for today. It’s a short lunch. Today’s News For Lunch has been brought to you by McCain for President.