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Blizzard Account Phishing Email January 5, 2010

Posted by Wilhelm2451 in Blizzard, World of Warcraft, entertainment.
Tags: , ,
4 comments

Proving again that World of Warcraft is big business, I got a phishing email this morning trying to get me to send all my account information to somebody in order to keep my account from being suspended.

HELLO!

It has come to our attention that you are trying to sell your personal World of Warcraft account(s).

As you may not be aware of, this conflicts with the EULA and Terms of Agreement.

If this proves to be true, your account can and will be disabled.

It will be ongoing for further investigation by Blizzard Entertainment’s employees.

If you wish to not get your account suspended you should immediately verify your account ownership.

You can confirm that you are the original owner of the account by replying to this email with:

Use the following template below to verify your account and information via email.

  • First and Surname
  • Date of birth
  • Address
  • Zip code
  • Phone number
  • Country
  • Account e-mail
  • Account name
  • Account password
  • Secret Question and Answer

Please enter the correct information

If you ignore this mail your account can and will be closed permanently.

Once we verify your account, we will reply to your e-mail informing you that we have dropped the investigation.

Regards,

Account Administration Team
Blizzard Entertainment

This follows the pattern of dozens of similar emails I have seen advising me that I needed to provide information for my eBay, PayPal, or financial institution account.

  • I’ve been accused of doing something that I am quite clearly not doing to provoke me into responding quickly without thinking.  The idea is to get you in the mood to quickly clear your good name.
  • I am asked for information to confirm that the account in question is mine.  This includes information that Blizzard always tells you that no Blizzard representative will ever ask you for.
  • I am asked to respond to an address, in this case the email reply-to address that looks close to valid.  This time it was “blizzard@mail-blizzard.com.”  The address actually displayed as “blizzard@blizzard.com” until I hit reply, and the reply-to was different.

Now getting an email like this isn’t exactly news.  As I said, I have seen dozens of variations of this sort of thing.  But I figured it was timely, what with Tobold also writing about account security, to just check and make sure that we all know NOT to respond to an email like this.

In my case, this email showed up in the in-box of an account which has no association with any of my Blizzard accounts, but one I use to create accounts on gaming sites where I may or may not return, so it is easy to remember with a standard password that is not very secure.

Blizzard, like any company that faces such account hacking threats, has a long page of information about various hacking and phishing threats, how you can help avoid them, and what you should do if you are a victim.

I personally did what Blizzard requested on the page, which was to forward the email with “show headers” enabled to “hacks@blizzard.com” so they are aware of yet another phishing attempt.

Do You Re-Map? January 4, 2010

Posted by Wilhelm2451 in EverQuest, EverQuest II, MMO Design, World of Warcraft, entertainment, polls.
17 comments

You know how it feels.

You’ve hit enter to bring up the cursor in the chat window, but somehow you didn’t hit the key hard enough of it didn’t take for some reason.  You don’t notice however.  Instead you start typing in your message.

And your first sign that something is wrong is the sudden appearance of a variety of different windows in your field of view.  They open, close, change focus, move tabs, and generally put on a little dance while your brain figures out that you’re not typing into the chat window at all.

So you know that sensation, right?

I have a friend who re-maps his keys so radically that touching the keyboard in WoW brings up that very sensation.  Nothing does what I expect.  I want to just move and windows open and close all over.  The keyboard is, essentially, unusable by anybody but him.

Now his history in games is a little different than mine.  He picked up at Diablo, then went to Diablo II, and then straight into EverQuest where he became a raider, was in a big guild, ran multiple accounts with a couple of level cap characters on each.

But he never had any interest in first person shooters.  He played a little StarCraft with us, but that wasn’t his thing either.

No, his primary influence was EverQuest.  And he didn’t like the keyboard layout in EverQuest that much, so he created his own layout.  This layout is perfectly logical to him, but he has so far be unable to explain its logic to anybody else.  It only makes sense in the context of being him.

And when he jumped from EverQuest to World of Warcraft, his keyboard layout came with him.

Now I am about the farthest one can be from him when it comes to re-mapping keys and still actually do some re-mapping.

I move the key for the quest log to “L,” because that is where most games I play put it in any case.

Most developers agree, the quest log should be mapped to "L"

For a while, when EverQuest II was my main game, I would re-map the quest log to “J” because that was how SOE did it.  However, now when I play EQ2, I map the quest journal there to “L.”

And, if I have to, I will edit the WASD key functions to make sure that they behave the way I expect.  There seems to be a surprising lack of agreement on which keys should be used to strafe and which should be used to turn.

Other than that, I tend to leave everything as it is.

This, of course makes my system as unusable to him as his is to me.  And it leads to some pretty futile, opinion-laden discussions about which is the better system.

With those two points of view in mind, I thought I would open up the year with a poll.

Battlestar Rhapsody January 3, 2010

Posted by Wilhelm2451 in Humor, entertainment.
Tags: , ,
3 comments

Spotted over at Wandering Goblin, this is a pretty good/amusing summary of Battlestar Galactica.

However, you have to have seen most of the series to get the jokes.  The truly obsessed won’t see the humor I’m sure.

2010 MMORPG Progdictionations January 1, 2010

Posted by Wilhelm2451 in Blizzard, Diablo III, Dungeons & Dragons Online, EVE Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Sony Online Entertainment, Star Trek Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft, blog thing, entertainment.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
8 comments

MMORPG predictions, now in its third year here at TAGN.

Having done the same thing for both 2008 and 2009 predictions, I thought I would change it up a bit and go for a series of short, sharp, and easily scored predictions for 2010.

Yes, I still have that cold I mentioned the other day, so I’m not feeling very creative at the moment.

Of course, other people are putting out their predictions for next year, so I am putting this sentence in as a place to link to them as their posts show up.

See!  Creativity, out the window!  On with the floor show!

Not Nine, Just Six

Polar Bear in a Blizzard

My quick predictions for Blizzard in 2010! (5 points each)

  • StarCraft II – Will ship second quarter 2010
  • Cataclysm – Will ship fourth quarter 2010
  • Cataclysm – Will beat WotLK’s 24 hour sales record (early 2012 prediction: whatever follows Cataclysm won’t do as well)
  • Diablo III – Will not ship in 2010
  • New MMO – An announcement at BlizzCon with the usual Blizzard mystery build-up

Every Station but PlayStation

Sony Online Entertainment predictions! (5 points each)

  • Planetside – Dead by December
  • Norrath – Official details about the next Norrath based MMORPG some time in 2010
  • Norrath – The next Norrath based MMORPG won’t be called EverQuest III
  • EverQuest II – All digital distribution after the February expansion
  • EverQuest – The next round of server consolidation will happen, and it will be a good thing
  • The Agency – Won’t ship in 2010
  • PlayStation 3 – SOE still won’t have a PS3 MMO title by the end of 2010

Electronic Arts and Science

What will EA do? (5 Points each)

  • SWTOR – Not in 2010, no no no.
  • WAR – Won’t die in 2010, but won’t magically spring back to life either.  It will just trudge on with enough resources to keep it going and improve it slightly, but not enough to change anything dramatically.

Turning the Turbine

(5 points each)

  • LOTRO – Next expansion, announced in 2010, will be the Riders of Rohan!
  • LOTRO – Riders of Rohan will feature real mounted combat
  • DDO – Continued success under the free to play banner with a push into some overland content
  • New – We’ll hear about Turbine’s next project in 2010.

Glory to the CCCP!

(5 points each)

  • Station ambulation – Still just a myth in 2010
  • Dust 514 – Not for 2010
  • EVE – Two Content Releases, don’t we always get two a year?
  • EVE – Tech III ships will finally become common enough that you might actually see one now and again.

Leading by Torchlight

(5 points each)

  • An inexpensive expansion will be released for Torchlight to keep funding going for Runic’s MMO
  • Runic will give us some concrete details about said MMO
  • That MMO won’t ship in 2010
  • But said details will make some pundit say, “Wow, that’s what Dungeon Runners should have done.”

NCSofties

(5 points each)

  • Aion – Going to seem like a replay of Lineage II, popular in Asia, less so in the west.  Still, it will have enough customers to keep going.  Given how readily NCSoft shuts things down, that will be saying something.
  • GuildWars 2 – Not for 2010
  • PlayStation 3 – NCSoft still won’t have a PS3 MMO title by the end of 2010

Other Titles

(5 points each)

  • Darkfall – Will continue walking the tightrope between hardcore PvP focus and giving players something to do when they aren’t actively engaged in battle.  Slow growth with at most a single server added to the game for 2010.
  • Star Trek Online – Won’t disappoint Trek fans, but we’re all co-dependent on the franchise after years of reckless treatment by the studio.  We’ll all still be there after the first 30 days playing with our pre-order bonus items.  The rest of you people though…
  • Hero’s Journey – It was best of show at E3 in 2005, but it will still be a no-show in 2010.

MMO Industry

The following people will have new companies and new projects announced in 2010 (2 point each):

  • Mark Jacobs
  • Richard Garriott
  • Bill Roper
  • Brian Green
  • Scott Hartsman

One of the following companies will announce their first/next project, and it won’t be an MMO (5 points):

  • Aventurine
  • Carbine Studios
  • Red5 Studios
  • Simutronics
  • Turbine

One of the following people will move to Canada (5 points):

  • Scott Jennings
  • Mark Jacobs
  • Brian Green
  • Scott Hartsman
  • Richard Bartle
  • Alan Crosby
  • David Reid

Spurious Logic

Random neurons firing for the following guesses.

Most subscription MMOs that sell vanity items like pets or appearance gear will sell custom mounts by the end of 2010.  WoW and EQ2 will be the benchmark. (5 points)

“Yahtzee” Croshaw will review exactly ONE muh-more-puh-gah on Zero Punctuation during 2010, and it will be Star Trek Online.  He won’t like it (duh) but the Trekkie humor will be too much for him to resist doing a review. (5 points)

We will find out that the following people will be appearing or doing voice work in the Warcraft movie (IMDB  shows no actors as of this date – 1 point each):

  • Jack Black
  • William Shatner
  • Keanu Reeves
  • Ben Stein
  • James Earl Jones
  • John Ratzenberger
  • Bruce Campbell
  • Sarah Silverman
  • David Spade
  • Lucy Lawless

Total Points

If I count correctly, that should be 200 points total at stake.  I’m a little woozy at the moment, so I wouldn’t put money on it, but we’ll call it 200 for now.

If history is an accurate predictor of success I will probably get 40-60 points total.

Check back in December 2010 to see how I did.

In the mean time, what do you think will happen in 2010?

December in Review December 31, 2009

Posted by Wilhelm2451 in EVE Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Star Trek Online, World of Warcraft, blog thing, entertainment, wii.
2 comments

The Site

I actually got a few links from sites outside of the norm.

WoW.com pointed my way for the first time, which is saying something given how many WoW blogs there are, when they posted the Lich King Casino Royale Style video.

Then Binge Gamer’s The Bender Podcast mentioned and linked to me two times running with regards to Star Trek Online pre-order items.  I should probably go listen to what they actually said.  I just haven’t had the time.

I also got a shout out on the Multiverse Podcast.  Thanks guys!

And, in addition to all of that I got a nice note from the local and litigious  Erik Estavillo thanking me for linking to his site and offering to let me interview him if I liked.  Interviews are not really my thing, but I thought I would mention his willingness in case somebody else wants to pick his brain.

One Year Ago

Last December seemed to be all about the micropayments and the like.  Sony Online Entertainment surprised some by putting Station Cash driven stores into EverQuest and EverQuest II.  The selection wasn’t great and the pricing seemed a bit off, but I was more interested to know what other SOE products would get the Station Cash treatment.

And then EA announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic would be microtransaction financed.  Or maybe they didn’t.

In EverQuest II I ran Reynaldo Fabulous from creation to level 50 in an very short (to me) stretch of time.  And then I stopped.

In Azeroth we were still coming to grips with the Northrend instances.  In Utgarde Keep we managed to kill off Prince Keleseth, but couldn’t hold it together to finish the instance.

Meanwhile, somebody was working on a WoW code, akin to the old geek code that used to clutter many a .sig file back when Usenet was cool and we knew the spammers by name.

I actually found some time to play Lord of the Rings Online.

And on the MUD nostalgia front I was reminding people what quests used to be like and sharing some really bad limericks.

New Linking Sites

The following sites have been kind enough to link here.  Please take a moment to visit them in return!

Most Viewed Posts in December

  1. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
  2. Star Trek Online Pre-Order Choices
  3. Play On: Guild Name Generator
  4. The Catch in the Free-to-Play Model
  5. THE ULTIMATE CONTENT!!!
  6. WoW Patch 3.3 Musings
  7. Torchlight Troubles
  8. The Wintergrasp Cheat?
  9. The Lich King… Bond Style
  10. Heroic Deadmines!
  11. Star Trek Online – More Desicions on What to Buy
  12. Star Trek Online Options We’d Like to See

Deleted Comment of the Month

you guys are such losers get a life
NERDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[Don't worry MMO gamers, it was on a Pokemon post]

Search Terms of the Month

Il faut donner tout pour tout
[Who am I, Dag Hammarskjöld?]

+”brent hand”
[I'm not sure I want to know...]

EVE Online

Nothing.  Really, I’ve done nothing but change skills for the last month.

Oh, sure, I flew around in my Zephyr long enough for a screen shot or two, but that was about it.

EverQuest II

As I said in my other post today, I think EverQuest II has ceased to be an active and viable game for me.  My heart just is not in it any more.  And I cannot even got back just to play with Verteran Rewards anymore.  They fixed the counter so that as of some point in mid-2009 it only adds the days you are actually subscribed, not just the days since you created your account.  A pity, since that was something that actually coaxed me back regularly.

Station Access lapses today, so I’ll have to indulge my nostalgia quickly.

Star Trek Online

I’ve pre-ordered from GameStop so I’ll get the classic Enterprise as my bonus.  Plus I went the collector’s edition route.  I am a sap that way.

World of Warcraft

The instance group has been big on the horde side of things this month.  Meanwhile my mother, my daughter, and I have all finally hit level 58 and can now proceed to the Outlands.

Wii

The Wii has seen a bit of a revival after a dormant summer.  Rock Band livened things up a bit, plus my daughter has been interested in going to back to some of the LEGO games.  We’ve been working our way through LEGO Batman again.  Catwoman is my daughter’s favorite character.  Mine too, but for different reasons I’m sure.

Coming Up

It will be a new year soon.  That means some predictions of some sort in the January 1st tradition.  Look for them tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Star Trek Online will go into open beta in January.  I’m sure I will have something to say about that.

And, of course, there is always WoW.

Checking My 2009 Gaming Goals December 31, 2009

Posted by Wilhelm2451 in EVE Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft, blog thing, entertainment.
1 comment so far

This is one of those posts that would be a lot more effective if I had gotten around to doing a post early in the year about what those goals were.

I started on that post, but never quite got around to putting it up.  I have the draft still sitting around, so I’ll work from that.

Cap Out In WoW – Completed

I wanted to hit the level cap of 80 and, with the instance group, finish out all the base five person instances.

We managed to do that by August.  In fact, I have two level 80 characters, one of which leveled through instances and another who did so through questing.  So I do feel I got quite the tour of Northrend and ingested a large dose of WoW lore, which comes in quite concentrated form in Wrath of the Lich King.

Blizzard has added some more content for the instance group since I hit my goal, but that will be for next year I think.

See Moria – Fail

Moria is one of the places in The Lord of the Rings that I really want to see brought to life in a 3D world.  And so, with the Mines of Moria expansion for Lord of the Rings Online, I had an opportunity.

I started new characters on a new server, ran one up to level 30 or so, then did not get much further.  The closest I got was Rivendell.

Take a Year Off from SOE – Mostly Complete

After my late 2008 run to level 50 with Reynaldo Fabulous, I was feeling quite bored with EverQuest II.  EverQuest I only visit for nostalgia purposes, and there are no other SOE games to which I feel any strong attachment.

So I thought I would just take a year off from SOE.  Maybe that would make Norrath seem more fresh.

I came back a little early to attend the Revelry and Honor anniversary bash, but really haven’t felt like logging into EQ2 (or any other SOE game since I had to invest in a month of Station Access to make sure I could play the characters I wanted to during my time on).  Even my daughter, who wants to see Frostfell Village every Christmas was done running around there in under 15 minutes.

EQ2 might have gone from “games I play” to “games I used to play” and become one for the nostalgia list.

Double My ISK in EVE – Complete

In EVE Online, I wanted to double my ISK holdings and buy a freighter.  I managed to buy the freighter and more than triple my ISK reserves as measured from the start of the year.

Now I have a whole bunch of ISK and no goals.

Two Comment Maximum – Mostly Complete

More of a blogging goal than a gaming goal, but I blog about games, so they mix.

The idea here was to limit myself to a maximum of two comments on any post on another blog.  After that point, anything further I had to say would have to come in the form of a post on my own blog.

The reasoning behind this was:

  1. To not be the persistent a-hole who monopolizes (and thus generally destroys) a comment thread by latching on to a single point and beating it to death
  2. To not become invested in petty arguments that are generally as meaningful as arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin
  3. To put more thought into my comments

The first is easy to see.  It happens all the time.

I think the second is obvious, though often only after the fact.

The third though, is a bit deeper.  Like most people, I imagine, my comments on posts tend to get a lot less thought than things I post on my own blog.  By limiting myself to two comments (one to express my point and one clarify anything I might have not stated as clearly as I would have liked) I felt I would force myself to think more before I commented.  I thought perhaps it might drive me to greater clarity and less confrontation.

Or at least it might make for a few more posts on my own site.

In the end, I managed to mostly stick to two comments.  I think I only violated that when somebody grossly misunderstood what I was saying and I had to back and point out that I was actually agreeing with that person and was, perhaps, not as clear in that statement as I should have been.

I’m not sure I gave them all more thought because of my limit or if I just took two cheap shots and called it a night.  It did lead to one of my more creative posts of the year though.

This goal, of course, did not apply to comments on my own site.  In your own home you get to do as you like.  This was about being a better person in the homes of other people.

Result

On failed completely, two fully complete, and two mostly complete.  Not bad.

I’ll have to think about what I should shoot for in 2010… and maybe even post about it before next December.

How about you?  Did you have any gaming goals for the year?

Star Trek Online European Pre-Order Bonuses December 31, 2009

Posted by Wilhelm2451 in Star Trek Online, entertainment.
Tags:
6 comments

The Star Trek Online area of the UK MMO Hub Star Trek Online site has a listing of all the Star Trek Online pre-order bonuses that are being offered both in Europe and North America.

It currently looks like the only in-game item that European players will get that we in North America won’t is a Starfleet Shuttle, which is available if you order via GameStation.

On the flip side, it looks like Europeans won’t face quite the myriad of conflicting choices if they pre-order. There appears to be no Constitution Class ship option, for example.

Only available in America?

On the other hand, their special Gold Edition (Collector’s Edition?) includes a T-shirt and a map of the Star Trek Universe.

That is all I have seen on the subject so far.  Has anybody seen anything else?

Last Day for the Pandaren Monk December 30, 2009

Posted by Wilhelm2451 in Blizzard, World of Warcraft, entertainment.
Tags: ,
4 comments

Blizzard Store Image of the Pandaren Monk

Maybe.

Or it is at least close to the last day to buy the Pandaren Monk in-game pet and justify it to yourself as a donation to charity.

Half of the purchase price of every Pandaren Monk sold through December 31, 2009 will be donated to the Make-a-Wish Foundation, further demonstrating his benevolent nature (though, in idle moments, he may still practice his Kung Fu moves).  Once activated, this World of Warcraft in-game pet key applies to all present and future characters on a single North American World of Warcraft license.

So Blizzard may go on selling the Pandaren Monk after December 31st.  The statement does not say that sales will stop on the 31st.   But Blizzard won’t be donating any more of the proceeds to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Those in Europe have a version to buy as well.

I’ve held out on buying one so far.  Have you?

Hulkageddon Returns! December 29, 2009

Posted by Wilhelm2451 in EVE Online, entertainment.
Tags: ,
11 comments

If you are mining in EVE Online you had best keep an eye on who is coming and going in your system and make sure you have a your shield booster ready to activate, because it looks like Hulkageddon will return.

Yes, from January 7th through the 14th of 2010 the swarthy pirate set will be vying for billions of ISK in prize money plus special achievement awards, all for killing the most mining ships in Empire space.  You can even send in your guess as to how many Hulks you think will die in Hulkageddon II.

This is just the sort of emergent gameplay that sandbox games encourage.

Coming to a New Eden solar system near you!

Meanwhile a co-worker also reports that somebody is offering up a bounty to the person who can kill the most Zephyr scout ships in a 24 hour period.  Does somebody have any details on that?

Scoring My 2009 MMORPG Progdictionations December 29, 2009

Posted by Wilhelm2451 in Blizzard, Diablo III, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Humor, Star Wars: The Old Republic, World of Warcraft, entertainment, lego.
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
12 comments

The time has come to account for my January 1st predictions.

The real problem with me and predictions is that I set out to make a series of outrageous and humorous stabs at the future, but part way into it I get all reasonable and conservative and start making predictions that sound likely… or reasonable.

Not that I am any more accurate when I get conservative and reasonable.

On January 1st I made 15 predictions for the MMORPG market for 2009.  Below are the results.  I am going to assign each prediction a possible score of 10 points, with partial credit available.  How many points out of 150 will I get?

I am not going to paste in all the original predictions as it would make the post very long, plus I have a cold which has not put me in the mood to perform any more work that I absolutely have to.  But they are all right here if you want to see them in their original glory.

1 – Private Citizen British

This one was fulfilled before I managed to post it.  He wants to get back into fantasy gaming, but nothing came of it in 2009.  He did not, however, use the word “vision.”  7 out of 10 points.

2 – Bartle’s Test

Dr. Bartle was on the money with this one by extolling the virtues of Stranglethorn Vale from the aspect of zone design.  As expected, more than a few disagreed on that, STV being one of the more complained about zones in the game.  Dr. Bartle stood his ground however; he meant what he said and he said what he meant.  Not a huge controversy, but enough for my needs.  8 out of 10 points.

3 – Age of Anarchy

Funcom did not, as I predicted, merge Anarchy Online and Age of Conan into a single game with two different front end clients.  More is the pity, since Age of Conan seems to need some sort of boost these days.  0 out of 10 points.

4 – EverQuesting

The 10 Year Anniversary of EverQuest was not as big of a deal as I thought it would be.  There was no return of the Living Legacy promotion, the expansion was not as sweeping as I thought it would be, it was called “Underfoot,” and did not include any of the features I speculated about.  And it was only available as a digital download.

On the other hand, one thing I did suggest was:

and at least one method of advancing your character while off-line.  Not experience, nor AAs, but maybe skills or some other new character attribute.  It will be very slow, but will only work while you are subscribed, showing that SOE is trying to tap some of that EVE Online training magic to keep subscriptions going.

That pretty much sounds like research assistants in EverQuest II.  I am going to give myself 2 points out of 10 on that alone.

5 – Call Your Agency

Of the three games Sony has been talking about, only Free Realms saw the light of day in 2009, which was one more than I thought would.  On the other hand, there is still no PS3 version of Free Realms.  So I am going to give myself partial credit on Free Realms, since I said that PS3 development would be holding up the launch and they decided to go without it.

We have not heard, officially or in rumors, that PS3 is what is holding up The Agency or DC Universe Online, so only partial credit there as well.  3 out of 10.

6 – Elves of the Burning Sea

Flying Lab Software did not attempt to boost their subscription rate by re-skinning Pirates of the Burning Sea with fantasy creatures, so 0 out of 10 points.  I should not let my own LEGO fantasies influence my predictions.

7 – LEGO Dalaran

Nobody built Dalaran out of LEGO bricks… yet, 0 out of 10 points.

8 – Station Cash Balance of Payments

I predicted that any game that did not get a Station Cash store was pretty much marked for closure.  The Matrix Online was the first to go.  Planetside is down to one server and Star Wars Galaxies isn’t making any headlines of late.  I am going to give myself 5 out of 10 on that one because I think Planetside will be gone when The Agency shows up.  And as for SWG…

9 – Star Wars Galaxies to Take A Bio

I predicted that we would find out this year that Lucas was only going to sanction one Star Wars themed MMORPG and that SWG was going to lose out of BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic.  I still think this is going to happen, so maybe I’ll roll it into the 2010 predictions.  But for 2009, 0 out of 10.

10 – Dawn of Darkfall

Darkfall did ship, but did not ship with the full list of promised features intact.  They suffered through launch issues like most MMOs, with things like skill exploits being closed off as time went along.  And they do appear to be walking the tightrope between PvP and other activities well for the time being.  You can argue amongst yourselves as to whether it is the second coming of Ultima Online or EVE Online in plate armor, but I’m taking 8 out of 10 points.

11 – Hero’s Slumber

Darkfall’s launch handed the MMORPG vaporware crown to Hero’s Journey which did not, as I predicted, ship in 2009.  That fact, however, was not the source of that much snarkiness that I could see, so 8 out of 10 points.

12 – Blizzard is Smarter Than You

I predict for Blizzard in 2009:

  • WoW Content patches – check
  • No WoW expansion – check
  • StarCraft II shipping – nope
  • StarCraft II and Diablo III news that will lead to whining – check
  • Info about their next MMO – nope

6 out of 10 points.

13 – The New Guys

Red 5 Studios, Carbine Studios, and 38 Studios provided practically no details about what they are working on.

On the other hand, I also said that nothing they announced would set the MMORPG market on fire.  Certainly saying little or nothing qualifies.  A point for that.

And MetaPlace looks unlikely to become a talent incubator for the next generation at this point.

1 out of 10 points.

14 – Heroes and Champions

This was a silly and complex set of predictions, all built in parody of NCSoft West President David Reid saying last year that Tabula Rasa was here to stay shortly before they announced it was being shut down.

Key predictions -

  • City of Heroes will shut down after David Reid announces things are going well – nope
  • Champions Online will launch in the Fall of 2009 – check (okay, Sept. 1 isn’t quite fall, but close)
  • David Reid will lose his job at NCSoft – check

6 out of 10 points.

15 – Tobolderized

No Toboldipedia or Toboldwiki created this year.  I blame Tobold’s summer break.

0 out of 10 points.

Results

The final count gives me 46 points out of 150, or 30.67% which, while abysmal, still beats last year’s 22%.

I think the Tobold predictions are dragging me down.  I may have to jettison him for 2010… or come up with something more plausible.

Now I just have to come up with some predictions for 2010!  Though right now, what I really want to predict is an over-the-counter decongestant that really works.  Stupid cold.

The 10 Year Anniversary of EverQuest was not as big of a deal as I thought it would be.  There was no return of the Living Legacy promotion, the expansion was not as sweeping as I thought it would be, it was called “Seeds of Destruction,” and did not include any of t

he features I speculated about.

On the other hand, one thing I did suggest was:

and at least one method of advancing your character while off-line.  Not experience, nor AAs, but maybe skills or some other new character attribute.  It will be very slow, but will only work while you are subscribed, showing that SOE is trying to tap some of that EVE Online training magic to keep subscriptions going.

That pretty much sounds like research assistants in EverQuest II.  I am going to give myself 3 points out of 10 on that alone.