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Rift to Launch March 1, 2011 January 4, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Misc MMOs, Rift.
2 comments

There is a press release and everything.

Founder’s pricing, pre-order items, collector’s edition, the standard fare for a launch.  We’ll see if they can make it more confusing as it gets closer like Cryptic did with STO.  Maybe a KFC tie-in?

RIFT™ SET TO LAUNCH MARCH 1, 2011

Retail and Digital Pre-Order Start Today

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. – January 4, 2011 – Trion Worlds, a global publisher and developer of premium online games, today announced that the upcoming MMORPG Rift™ is scheduled to launch in North America on March 1st  and in Europe on March 4th. Today also marks the start of the game’s pre-order program through both digital and retail channels.

“The launch of Rift is the culmination of our tireless efforts over the past several years to bring players the most complete, full-featured, and dynamic online game they’ve ever experienced,” said Lars Buttler, CEO of Trion Worlds. “Through the dedication, creativity, and incredible track record of our veteran development team, we’ve been able to create an exceptionally polished and immersive online world filled with adventure, surprise, and beauty. We can’t wait to share Rift with players around the world.”

Beginning today, customers who pre-order Rift receive their choice of one-of-three exclusive in-game pets, and are eligible to participate in the head-start period anticipated to begin February 24th. Pre-order customers will also be granted access to play in all remaining closed-beta events. Beta details, including a regularly updated event schedule, are available at http://www.RIFTgame.com/beta.

Available for purchase online and at select retail outlets, the Standard, Digital Collector’s and Retail Collector’s Editions of the game will sell for $49.99, $59.99 and $79.99 USD, respectively. The standard monthly subscription rate for the game will be $14.99 USD.

Rift will also offer a limited-time “Founder’s Pricing” for players, featuring a $9.99 USD/month price for a multi-month subscription.  For more information on Founder’s Pricing and subscription details, visit http://www.RIFTgame.com/subscriptions.

For all info on the Collector’s Editions, pre-order incentives, and subscription plans, please visit http://www.RIFTgame.com/preorder.

Rift is rated T for Teen by the ESRB with the following content descriptors: Alcohol Reference, Blood, Mild Language and Violence.

For the latest info on Rift, please visit http://www.RIFTgame.com/.

Spam Comment of the Year Competition is Now Open January 4, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in blog thing, entertainment, Humor.
Tags: ,
1 comment so far

I wasn’t really planning such a competition for 2011 or for any other period of time.

Then I got this comment.

I have a website with free WoW guides that cost money!!

-Nick

That was just too cute and too good of a yardstick by which to measure all other spam comments.  This comment now stands as the best spam comment of the year (so far) for this site.  I will let you know when it has been potentially surpassed.

Meanwhile, just in case you are selling WoW Guides or in-game currency or anything of the sort and you want me to advertise your site, read this post first.

That is pretty much how I foresee any negotiations proceeding.

Good luck.  Now waiting for the next great spam comment.

(Note: Nothing you say in comments counts SynCaine… not for this competition at least.)

What is the Scale of this Blog Health-o-Meter? January 4, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in blog thing, entertainment, EVE Online, Star Trek Online.
Tags: , ,
9 comments

WordPress.com had something new for me this new years.  They sent to me, and presumably anybody else with an active WordPress.com blog a little year end summary report on my blog.

Actually, I received a report for three different blogs: this blog, EVE Online Pictures, and Star Trek Online Pictures.

(That last one represents how committed I was to STO a year ago.)

The report came with the option to automatically post it to your blog, though I declined to do that here as I found the formatting awkward and inconsistent with the theme I use.  But if you really want to see a full report, I did post the one for EVE Online Pictures just to see what it looked like. (Awkward and inconsistent.)

But getting three reports let me see something that somebody might not notice if they only had a single blog or perhaps multiple blogs that got about the same number of page views over the course of the past year.  The report has a “Blog Health-o-Meter” as part of the package, and it is, I gather, based on the number of page views your blog received in 2010.

So, for example, this was the meter reading for The Ancient Gaming Noob:

Health of The Ancient Gaming Noob

I think that “Wow” is their assessment of the blog and not an indication of what I a lot of my posts are about.

And then they include some text to give some basis to the reading of the meter.

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 460,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 20 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, you wrote 396 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 1763 posts. You uploaded 894 pictures, taking up a total of 160mb. That’s about 2 pictures per day.

20 days of Louvre traffic.  So that is what it takes to get my reading on the meter. (The site actually had 473,063 page views, but I guess I fell into a bucket of 460-475K or the like.)

So there, I thought, is the scale.

Then I went and looked at the EVE Online Pictures report, which had this meter reading:

Health of EVE Online Pictures

Not bad.  I’m on fire, which I guess is a good thing.  And given the size of the whole meter and the difference in position between the two blogs, you might guess that EVE Online Pictures is somewhere in the same zone as TAGN.

Here is what WordPress.com said:

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 38,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, you wrote 107 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 308 posts. You uploaded 155 pictures, taking up a total of 59mb. That’s about 3 pictures per week.

The ratio there is about 12 to 1 in favor of TAGN, something you don’t really get a sense of from the meter. (The actual page view number is 38,966 for 2010, so they were closer this time around.)

And we learn that the Lourve is more than twice as popular as the Taj Mahal.  I bet you didn’t know that!

And then there is Star Trek Online Pictures, which I suspended posting to when I stopped playing regularly, which wasn’t that long after launch.  Here is the meter for that:

Health of Star Trek Online Pictures

Doing awesome, up there on the line between the green and the… not green section of the meter.  And what does it take to get on the line like that?

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,200 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, you wrote 13 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 21 posts. You uploaded 25 pictures, taking up a total of 6mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

There is about a 17 to 1 ratio in favor of EVE Pics and a 209 to 1 ratio in favor of TAGN, but still in the green.  They were nearly spot on with the number of page views (2246 total) and they left me with the strange desire to calculate how many 747-400 jets it would take to transport all the visitors to the Louvre… or the Taj Mahal… or both.

But the scale of the meter, that is still somewhat ambiguous.

Okay, I get it.  WordPress.com is in the business of hosting blogs and you get people to pay for services by encouraging them.  With that goal you can’t really send people a meter with the arrow all the way to the left and the caption, “Nobody even knows you exist!” then compare them to, say, the number of live births at the North Pole and expect that to be a winning formula for customer encouragement and retention.

And maybe the green segment has significance.  Maybe you do not even get a chart if you do not meet a certain minimum threshold.

I have two other blogs that I was experimenting with at one point, one of which got 516 page views in 2010, and one which got 5.  I did not get a report for either of those.  Then again, maybe they haven’t gotten that far down the list.  I wonder how many page views is at the mean of the bell curve.  With 16 million blogs hosted, I cannot imagine it is a huge number.

Do you have a WordPress.com blog?  Did you get a new year’s chart?  To what did they compare your traffic?

Do you use a different service for your blog?  Do they do anything similar?

Integrated stats is one of the main reasons I went with WordPress.com over four years ago, after experimenting with a couple of other services.  But things change.

Our First Guild Achievement January 3, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, World of Warcraft.
Tags: , , ,
3 comments

The Twilight Cadre, our guild on Eldre’Thalas is still level 1 as of this writing, but it now has an achievement.

And our grand, single achievement is defeating the Stormwind Stockade and stealing Hogger’s Trousers.

We came to be stealing Hogger’s Trousers because there are still things that World of Warcraft does not do well.

Because of the guild leveling and achievements things, we have been consolidating as much as we can into a single guild so that our efforts are not dispersed.  So we’ve ditched other guilds, transferred some characters, and have gotten some friends to roll up fresh characters on our server.

And this has lead us to have main characters all across the range of levels, which was the problem we faced the other day.

We were trying to pull together a group of characters from the five people online that could do an instance and get that first guild achievement,  but the best we could do was this:

  • 17 Priest
  • 27 Hunter
  • 32 Paladin
  • 33 Warrior
  • 45 Rogue

A bit of a range spread there.

Now, on the bright side, WoW doesn’t keep a group like this from forming up and doing something.  You want a wide range of levels in your group, go right ahead.  Other games, like EverQuest II would keep level 17 characters from getting quest credit or experience if they were grouped with a level 45.

On the other hand, while there are no restrictions on grouping up, WoW doesn’t do you any favors after that really.  There is nothing like EQII’s mentoring.  There are no instances that scale to the average level of your group like Splitpaw.

Furthermore, you cannot use dungeon finder with a group like that.  DF has level range restrictions for each instance, and there is no overlap between 17 and 45.

So it was a good thing that Stormwind Stockade was a viable choice, since most of us were in town to start with.  It would have been a little under level for most of us even if the rogue had been 30 rather than 45.  And with a level 45 rogue along it was a complete walk-over.  But we went anyway.

Of course the priest died.  And the warrior couldn’t hold aggro with the rogue doing so much damage.  But we got though it well enough and it was probably good for a group that hadn’t worked together as a team before to do a milk run like this.

Because at least 4 out of 5 members of the group were in the guild (all 5 were), the guild got its first achievement. (Note the little guild banner on the mini-map with the number 5 in it.)

I expect this to be the first in a long line of guild achievements, continuing next with the Deadmines now that we’re past the holiday season.  And, with people consolidating on the single guild, there is a glimmer of a hope that maybe, at some point, we might have enough people around to try a 10-person raid.

We shall see.

LEGO Minifigure Roundup January 2, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, lego.
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This morning we started the LEGO minifigure roundup.

The little LEGO figures that come with most LEGO kits these days get played with more than any other aspect of our LEGO collection.

However, because of this, they do tend to get scattered about the house.  They also get taken apart and assembled in new and unique ways.  So the roundup was attempt to both find minifigures and to get them back to their original state.

After about two hours of rummaging around I was able to collect all of these minifugures and associated parts on the table.

Minifigure Mania!

If you look at the full size version of that picture, it can be seen as something of a “Where’s Waldo” game.

Among the figures you can spot are:

  • Harry Potter
  • Indiana Jones and his father
  • Squidward Tentacles
  • Grand Moff Tarkin
  • Darth Vader
  • Lando Calrissian
  • Batman
  • Greedo
  • Boba Fett
  • C-3P0 (golden version)
  • Aang, The Avatar
  • Pops Racer

I managed to get this mess mostly sorted, put back together, and stored away by theme.  But there were a lot of missing pieces.  We’ll have to go back in for round 2 at some point.

Good Gaming Vietnam! January 2, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in blog thing, entertainment, Humor.
Tags: ,
8 comments

That favorite blogs post over at Massively is the gift that keeps on giving.

I noticed some traffic today from a Vietnamese gaming site, Gamek.vn, which appears to have picked up the favorite blogs post and reworked it into Vietnamese.  Of course, they didn’t mention Massively.  But then they didn’t copy the article verbatim either.  Maybe it was just an amazing parallel list.

Here is what they said about this site:


If I trust Google Translate, it says that I get much sympathy from my ant-like readership.  Not exactly a winning endorsement for either you or me.

This is, of course, why I do not trust Google Translate.

Still, that translation is better that what it says for West Karana, which Google suggests focuses uniquely on exploiting new online games.  Haxors!

And poor Syp,  all they could say about Bio Break is that it once had a series of articles about Warhammer. I think Google Translate actually rendered that one okay, along with the Hardcore Casual being all about Darkfall.

Anyway, if you found your way here from Gamek.vn, hello and welcome!  Maybe you can give me a more accurate translation of what was written, since they did not appear to copy the Massively text directly.

My Demands for 2011 January 2, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, blog thing, Diablo III, entertainment, EVE Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Humor, Sony Online Entertainment, Star Trek Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, World of Warcraft.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
10 comments

It is the new year, and with that comes predictions.  You can find plenty of them out there.  Lots of people have them, like Tipa, Spinks, Lum (those were predictions, right?), Green Armadillo and Keen. (More linked as I find them.)

Me?  I’m done with predictions.  Predictions come from a position of weakness!  I think my 2008, 2009, and 2010 predictions pretty much prove that.

For 2011 I am making demands!

And if my demands are not met, there will be consequences!  Consequences I tell you!

You have until December 15th to meet these demands!

Blizzard:

Stop looking so damn smug.  Tell us what Titan is,  ship Diablo III, and add some more content to the top end of World of Warcraft.  I swear half the game is already level 85.  Oh, and another sparkle pony, but something a little less frou-frou this time.  And an expansion for StarCraft II.  Somebody has to sell some PC games this year.

Sony Online Entertainment:

Smedley? SMEDLEY!  Pull yourself together.  I know those PlayStation people are bossing you around, but you make money.  Certainly more than they make on hardware.  Refine what you have.  More server merges.  Reconcile EverQuest II Live and EverQuest II Extended.  Work on the PC controls for DC Universe Online because I am NOT hooking up a console controller to my PC just to play it.  And finish with the Agency already, you’re starting to embarrass us all.

Cryptic:

Just go free to play across the board already.  Champions and Star Trek Online.  Everybody else is doing it.  But don’t screw over the lifetime subscribers.  And when you go free to play, make sure you have something shiny and new to bring people back.  Oh, and Neverwinter, get it out this year and don’t screw it up!

BioWare:

Everybody is watching you.  You’re not making some single player game.  You’re making an engine, an engine that is supposed to take in money and deliver the joy of being in the Star Wars universe.  Don’t let those wankers in San Mateo make you ship early.  Meanwhile, since you guys seem to be in the MMO driver’s seat at EA, for now, don’t screw around with Ultima Online, but do something about Warhammer Online.  You’re bright guys, you’ll figure something out.

CCP:

Will you put that drink down already?  EVE is still going, still making money, still popular, still unique, I get it.  And you are improving it over time.  But really, you’re starting to look like a one-trick pony.  What are all those people in Atlanta doing?  You don’t have to ship something new this year, but at least make us believe you’re really working on something new.  We’re starting to think you’re spending all that money you make on akvavit and exotic dancers.

NCsoft:

Aion, City of Whatever, and Guild Wars.  Is that really all you have going in North America?  Well, there is Lineage II I suppose.  And what do you have on your to do list?  Blade & Soul?  Really?  Don’t bother.  And let Guild Wars 2 gestate to full term, which means don’t ship it in 2011.

Trion Worlds:

Your big opportunity is coming.  Ship Rift at just about the time when WoW Players have finally wrapped up the high-end content and you could get… a stable half a million subscribers.  Okay, that isn’t WoW numbers, but history shows that most people just stick with their favorite MMO forever due to the social network they develop.  Hrmm… that is sounding like a prediction, not a demand.  Okay, go and get a half a million subscribers already!  By June!  With your shield or on it and all that!

Other MMO Studios:

Which of you is even poised to do anything in 2011?  TERA is going to be another Asian oddity, soon forgotten by the mainstream.  It was all that Aventurine could do to ship Darkfall, they won’t be doing anything else. Funcom won’t get The Secret World out in 2011, they’re more likely to cut more staff.  All of you other studios, select a champion and send it out to do battle.  Yes, it can be TERA if you cannot find anything else, but I’m telling you it is going to be completely forgettable.

Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw:

When Star Wars: The Old Republic ships this year, review it.  I know, it is a muh-more-puh-gah, but this is Star Wars and BioWare.  I demand it.  We all demand it!

Dr. Richard Bartle:

You were awfully quiet in 2010.  And you’ve got your three level 85s in WoW now. (A very common claim these days.)  Go say something controversial.  Declare WoW dead.  Predict SWTOR will be a failure as a virtual world.  Make some news.  Do an interview with those people at Massively.  They’ll print anything you say.

Points?

I suppose you expect me to assign points to these, and to score my success at the end of the year?  Screw that.  If my demands are not met, I will just sit back and announce the consequences.  And I have 11 or so months to work on that.  Remember, you have until December 15th!

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