Category Archives: Need for Speed World

January 2013 in Review

The Site

I’ve got nothing.

Krusty

Really, the site hasn’t changed. WordPress.com hasn’t screwed things up in any new and unusual ways. I still haven’t changed the look of the site. No unusual honors or attentions have come this way.

I haven’t even got any new linking sites this month. This is only the second time in 77 month in review posts that has happened. Time to run with some “classic” Krusty… I mean links.

So I am going to go with my usual ruse and run a poll and pretend that it is content.

And so it goes, month in review #77. But those poll results will probably be in #78.

One Year Ago

I asked 12 questions for 2012.

I updated the About Page to its current format. I am not sure it is any more useful, but it certainly is… uh… longer!

There was that whole SOPA thing. Are we safe yet? Somehow I think not.

I struck a couple of games from my watch list, as it seemed I would never go back to play them again.

I bought an iPad for our cats… judging by the pictures.

LEGO Universe joined the ever increasing list of departed MMOs when its free to play conversion failed to save it from extinction.

SOE gave us the subscription matrix for the EverQuest free to play transition. As part of that conversion, EQ Mac was targeted for extinction as well. (Spoiler: It survived.) Meanwhile, somebody had an EverQuest cocktail shaker on eBay.

Prompted by comments from others, I asked why those who sought an old school MMO experience were not out playing Vanguard.

Blizzard said they were going to be too busy in 2012 for a BlizzCon. Speaking of Blizzard, I hit level 85 at last in WoW.

Turbine announced that their fall expansion would be Rider of Rohan.

There was an odd divergent current about Star Wars: The Old Republic, with some declaring it dead already (one month in) while others were still in “best game ever” mode.

I was starting to moan… more loudly… about how free to play makes an MMO focus heavily on cash shop content… to the detriment of the game in my opinion. This was prompted, no doubt, by those wings. Smed, on the other hand, was very happy about free to play.

In EVE Online the war against White Noise came to a close, leading to a quiet time in the north. But a conflict with Raiden was looming. during the lull, I recalled my first PvP death in EVE and celebrated that Garde drones now actually went *pew* *pew*. Boring no more!

In Rift, the instance group was kicked off its server. We regrouped on a new server. We were also warming up and starting to work as a group again in the Iron Tombs and the Darkening Deeps. That last was a struggle.

The Type 59 tank was pulled from the cash shop in World of Tanks.

And, finally, there was Pop Muzik.

Five Years Ago

January 2008 saw me writing all sorts of stuff that came back to haunt me.

I started off with a helping of silly predictions.

Then, with Tabula Rasa dead to me since open beta, I started wondering if there was any hope at all for a Science Fiction MMORPG. This ended up being one of my most responded to posts ever with, in addition to all the comments, Potshot, Tipa, Lemegeton, Gooney, and even Massively following up with response posts. This post still gets a lot of views every month. (And yes, I do think there is hope, I just don’t know when we’ll get what we’re looking for.)

And, along with that, I wrote about five LEGO Video Games I would like to see made, another post that made the monthly list of most viewed posts on a regular basis a year later. [And I got a couple of the games I asked for!]

Then there was the start of the run-up to Pirates of the Burning Sea which, among other things, required me to invest in a new router.

In WoW, the Saturday night instance group was hitting Scholomance, Stratholme, and level 60, getting us to the Outlands only a year after Burning Crusade shipped!

In EVE Online, after spending millions of ISK, I managed my first Tech II Blueprint, then I couldn’t afford to build it. Ah, life in EVE. I also got my standing past 8.0 with the Caldari Navy and spent time hauling trash.

And, finally, in Lord of the Rings Online I was able to pick up my Bree Pony, the 2007 holiday gift to founders.

New Linking Sites

The following blogs have linked this site in their blogroll since 2007 or so, for which they have my thanks, and are still up and running and being updated, which makes them pretty rare.

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in January

Spam Comments of the Month

Yes! Finally someone writes about adjustable coffee.
[Because screw that non-adjustable coffee!]

buy azithromycin for chlamydia
[Yeah, we’ll talk about that later]

your words are like advice for me
[Your comment is like a simile to me!]

Search Term of the Month

гейб ньюэлл
[That is “Gabe Newell” in Belorussian, according to Google. How I got on the first page of results for “Gabe Newell” is another mystery.]

mafia wars myspace inventory
[Mafia Wars and MySpace? A match made… somewhere warm.]

why noone talks on nfs world?
[The same reason people don’t talk on the freeway, you cannot speak directly and texting distracts you from driving.]

information about servel cycles and weather changes occurred during the year 2012 to 2013 at various places around the globe
[This term brings you to the graphic for my New Year’s post. Google remains a mystery.]

EVE Online

It looked like war… and then it didn’t… and then a bunch of capital ships got blown up.

And I missed it all.

Okay, I did go on one fleet op this month and was on two kill mails. Plus I sealed my reputation with our new corp leadership by asking if there was a participation link after our rather over-long corp meeting this month. So I have that going for me.

And I now have enough skill points that I need a Tau grade clone, which runs 30 million ISK. That just reinforces my aversion to frigates and cruisers. They are cheap to lose, but when I get podded it puts 30 million ISK on top of the price. Won’t somebody save us from this regressive tax on the most successful (by at least one measurement) players in EVE?

Need for Speed World

I still play this a bit. Actually, for about 8 minutes every day. I do the gem hunt, which gives you a prize every day when you complete it. But it says right on the prize reward tab that the prizes get better every consecutive day you complete the gem hunt. I am testing this. I am currently past the 30 day mark. Expect a report on this some day when I am really bored.

Rift

Do I even play this game any more? Do I even play fantasy MMORPGs any more?

Evidence is starting to suggest I do not.

Expect a long and angst ridden post at some point laying the blame squarely on Blizzard and World of Warcraft for destroying the genre.

That’s what you’re supposed to do when you hit this point, right?

Or is SOE to blame for ruining EverQuest? Or for making EverQuest II? Or the NGE? I can never remember.

But expect something once I figure it out!

World of Tanks

The instance group, or most of it, has gravitated to WoT, which is something of an “old man’s shooter” to my mind. I like shooters, but when it comes down to it, I have never been very good at the run and gun and bunny hop routine, and my skills have not gotten better over the years. So a tank shooter, where you move slowly… unless you are in one of those damn T-50s… and things like cover, aim points, and line of site matter fares well with me.

It is also light, can be played in small doses, and is fun as a team… though we have to start working more like a team.

Coming Up

I have a post brewing about the iPad. I have had one for a year now, so it is probably time to explore how I thought I would use it with compared to what I actually ended doing with the thing. And I will probably insult people who make 99 cent apps again.

Something will likely happen in EVE. It always does. I’ll get some new tanks I bet. And some email to post about.

Meanwhile, the drought of posts about me actually playing a fantasy based MMORPG… there was exactly one this month… will probably continue.

December 2012 in Review

The Site

WordPress.com continues to fiddle with the site interface. They have very much the same attitude as Google on this sort of thing, where it often seems more important for them to get a cool new feature out than to check to see if it is actually better than what was in place… or even if it breaks what was already in place. Oh, and they always implement features first then wait half a day or so before posting something to explain that whatever it is you are raging about was on purpose. So it can be a matter of two steps forward, one step back, one step to the side, and cha cha cha.

So we got, for example, maps that do little to indicate anything. My little flag counter widget in the side bar is much more informative. They removed the ability to search on image files based on date… because screw searching by date I guess. They also broke, then later removed completely, RSS feeds that allowed you to follow tags and categories across all of WordPress.com, an incredible powerful feature that they let rot.

On the step forward side of things, they have decided to report unique visitors as well as page views as part of their standard statistics. I don’t know why it took them so long, but as of December 3rd, they were there. So the in the graph now, light blue is page views, dark blue is uniques.

Views and Uniques

I ran Site Meter here for a few months at one point just to see how unique visitors compared to page views, and the ratio back then was generally about 7-8 uniques per 10 page views. Now looking at the new stats, it seems to be around 6 uniques per 10 page views, which I guess means that people are staying longer or clicking on more things. I guess that is good. It would probably matter if the site generated ad revenue or such. For now it is just another bit of statistical trivia for me to mull over.

One Year Ago

There was the usual looking back at the Highs and Lows of 2011. And, hand-in-hand with that, there was the look forward at games I might play in 2012.

One of those games was Diablo III and another Torchlight II. They were both vying for the mantle of successor to Diablo II. So I tried to define the essence of Diablo II.

I also had some demands for 2011 and had to look at how that worked out.

I began my journey into null sec appropriately, by killing myself. Then I saw titans, lit cynos, and got blown up. But hey, a ship blows up every six seconds in EVE. There was a war on, and it was announced we were going to be driven from Deklein. And there was something about ganking tourism and three flavors of ravens.

There was the end of Star Wars Galaxies, though people were saying it had been dead for years.

Star Wars: The Old Republic went live, completing the changing of the Star Wars MMO guard, for all the lack of actual change that brought about.

EverQuest II and its free to play twin, EverQuest II Extended, were merged into a single fighting force of extraordinary magnitude or something.

Richard Garriott de Cayeux went a little nuts talking about his Ultimate RPG, his great fondness for EA, and the failure of Tabula Rasa and Ultima 8. He seemed to try to be getting EA to join with him by talking to the press… and not to EA. And then it was the Mayans.

Closer to planet Earth, the instance group was in the Realm of the Fae.

And I proved my laser tag prowess against a bunch of little girls.

Five Years Ago

December 2007 seemed to be a busy time for the SOE. First there was the whole “moving a whole guild from test to a live server” brouhaha. Then there was the rumor of SOE being purchased by Zapak Digital Entertainment. And, finally, there was the deal with Live Gamer to take over transactions on the Station Exchange servers, at which time Smed himself said that this did not mean that they were going to open the flood gates of RMT on any of their servers not currently served by SOE’s own Station Exchange RMT plan. All of which I wrapped up in one post.

The yearly EverQuest Nostalgia Tour was off to the usual activities.

I put up my predictions for the “Next EverQuest II Expansion,” which I have yet to score. I will have to get a post together comparing The Shadow Odyssey with my own guesses.

The Saturday Night Permanent Floating Instance Group was finishing up Blackrock Depths.

Dr. Richard Bartle brought up the “why so much fantasy” question for its regular beating to death.

I was interviewed over at World IV. So far that is the only interview I have ever been asked to do.

I lost my first battlecruiser to pirates in EVE Online. Meanwhile, after pissing away a lot of ISK on invention, I was not getting a lot of results.

And I bought a new gaming computer full of Quad Core goodness.

New Linking Sites

The following blogs have linked this site in their blogroll, for which they have my thanks.

Causual Gaming Chronicles (Pitrelli again!)
Healing the Masses

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in December

Search Terms of the Month

gay league of legends porn
[Okay, Rule 34 strikes again I suppose…]

gf cfc
[Good fight to you too…]

continued opportunity to kill off halflings
[About all we can ask for]

EVE Online

Things have been quiet in EVE Online this month. I haven’t been on the kill board since October. I have ratted now and again, which is something I can do while listening to the news or an audio book… or while writing checks. But fleet ops haven’t been very frequent with the end of the war in Tribute and Vale. Time to find some new activity in EVE I think.

EverQuest II

The nostalgia tour sputtered out basically when I made it past the original content. At level 50, the Desert of Flames content seems to be the most interesting to tackle, and it isn’t all that interesting after a bit. So Sigwerd made it from 42 to 53. He is fully equipped in mastercrafted gear again, should I want to make the run to 62 at some future date. But for now, EQII has petered out for me. Nostalgia always has a short shelf life.

Need for Speed: World

We have spent a bit of time in NFSW, where we have played it as a networked racing game, ignoring the rest of the world for the most part. That is actually pretty fun.

Rift

The holidays have kept the instance group from doing much in Telara. We did finish off all of the pre-Storm Legion five person instances, at least in “normal” mode. Now we are getting ourselves equipped in the expansion. With the new year we ought to be able to take a run at the first instance.

World of Tanks

This has become something of my main game for the last few weeks. Basically, it is a shooter that concentrates on vehicles, where I have always done better. In PlanetSide 2 I am always just a target on the ground. So it is probably best to just stay with the shooter where it is all vehicles all the time. I have made it to tier VI on a couple branches of the tech tree. But each higher tier becomes a bigger effort. We’ll see if I get to VII.

Coming Up

A whole new year.

The instance group will return to Telara. I will continue to play tanks. We will see if Need for Speed World was more than a week or two of fun.

But otherwise it will be a cold, gray month. Lots of time for games and writing about games I suppose.

The Long Lancia – More Fun in Need for Speed World

Not that Need for Speed World isn’t fun in and of itself. I just think we have found a new source of even greater fun.

NFSW had been revamped yet again since I last played. The cars have all be reclassified into new brackets based on their performance. Levels have been rendered all but useless in the game, save for unlocking certain cosmetic items in the in-game store which, if you think about it, is kind of dumb. Why would you restrict people from buying some of your vinyl decals until they hit level 20, 25, or 30? They have added a new kind of event, drag racing. And they have revamped the items and driver skills so that they have various stages of quality.

But the heart of the game remains the same. It is a serious pay to win design.

The best cars are all for sale in the RMT currency, Speed Boost (or SB). And while the best, four star parts and skill upgrades cannot be bought directly, you can buy an unlock that means you will win only the best items when you race. You can still win such parts without the unlock, but they are exceedingly rare. I have several dozen races in and I have only seen one three star item. You can spin that as buying convenience, but it still smells like pay to win to me.

Probably the best thing they have done is the revamp of car classifications. It used to be that a certain car was in a certain bracket no matter what you did to it. Now each car has a numerical rating, and the rating is based on the performance of the car. The rating is made up from the cars handling, acceleration, and top speed stats. That rating then determines the bracket in which your car races.

The brackets are, best to worst, A to E, plus S for super cars I guess. Your base starting car is likely in the E bracket but can be upgraded to the D bracket with just a few parts. You can buy cars in better brackets and improve them further as well.

Ideally, what this should mean is that when you join a random race in the game, the match making process should group you with cars of the same bracket. However, the match maker seems to be tuned to deliver more races over maintaining parity, so you will regularly end up in races that cover three brackets. If you are the C bracket car in a race with a couple of A bracket competitors, you had better be very good or they had better suck.

And sometimes they do suck.

I have been the C bracket car and beaten the guy in the A bracket Porsche. But it doesn’t happen very often.

So racing can be fun, but you really have to be ready for an uneven playing field. And if your skills are otherwise modest like mine, you had best be ready for a mostly losing record. Not that that has changed much over time, pre or post revamp.

And then Earl and Potshot joined the game.

More after the cut. Pictures and long winded descriptions.

Continue reading →

Holiday Fun in Need for Speed World

This year I decided to make a holiday video. Here is driving on the snowy golf course in Need for Speed: World.

Direct link to the video, which is available in sizes up to 720p.

The music is Holiday for Strings from the Jon Rauhouse album Steel Guitar Heart Attack.

Physics done silly made for some pretty amusing jumps in the snow. Certainly amusing enough to keep you distracted for a while.

A few additional pictures after the cut, if you are interested.

Continue reading →

Peeking in on Need for Speed World

For a while last summer I was playing EA’s free to play driving MMO, Need for Speed: World, pretty regularly.

It was reasonable fun, with races, polices chases, and a few other distractions. I put some money down for a couple of cars.

Eventually its appeal wore off and I summed up what I liked and disliked about it, then mostly stopped playing, halting my career at level 26.

But since then I have peeked in now and again to drive a bit and see what has changed.

And like most MMOs, the game has changed over time. And as with MMOs, I am sometimes strained to see how some of the changes have been for the better.

The first thing I noticed as time passed was the removal of police from the world. Police chases are no longer random things that could happen at any moment if you slammed into a police cruiser.

Patrol Cars go Flying

Instead, police pursuit became a type of road course, and instance like races and team escape. Police cars are no longer seen on the streets.

For me, that made the world feel a little less real.

Not that smashing into police cars was anything like realistic. But the police in the world were the one thing you could not smash into without fear of repercussion. They added a… well, sense of danger isn’t really the right term… but maybe a sense of constraint, a feeling that there were some limits in the world. There was a price to be payed (unless you could get away!) if you went too far.

They also changed up the daily treasure hunt. That wasn’t really a big change. They started actually giving out some better stuff at times. But it also became a vehicle to get you to spend Boost, their RMT currency. (Which, for some reason, never got combined with the rest of the EA Play4Free currencies.)

For the daily treasure hunt, your rewards now get better as you finish the hunt consecutive days in a row. But if you miss a day, you can buy your way back into your streak with the revive option.

A new place to spend Boost

They also changed the timer on the hunt. It used to be, to my recollection, based on calendar day. You could do the hunt on any given day. Now there is a 24 hour lock out on it, so if you finish the hunt at 6pm on Tuesday, you cannot do it again until 6pm Wednesday.

Here is something I wish everybody would pick up from Blizzard; the 20 hour day for lockouts. I hate when I forget, or am late, to do something that is on a 24 hour timer and then I am stuck with that late time going forward unless I just skip a day. I did the gem hunt late one evening, and the next evening just punted on it because I did not want to stay up that late again just for one small game event. That, of course, broke my streak, which removed an incentive for me to log on again, which in turn meant that I ended up not logging on and essentially stopped playing.

Ah well.

Spam bots are even more aggressive. The “free boost” scam bots now invite you to group.

Chat now auto-hides URLs at least

This happened to me one day when I was logged in off-peak. Apparently I was one of the few viable targets as the bot would invite me to group every two or three minutes until I logged off in frustration. There does not appear to be a way to auto-decline groups.

They have introduced language specific chat channel. When you log in for the first time since the change, it asks what your preferred language is and assigns you to an appropriate channel from there on.

This, however, appears to not be working out very well. The English language channels still seem to be full of other languages. Maybe those people fear that we will miss their long tirades in Portuguese.

Then there is the pain of world-spanning races. This was a problem before, but it seems to have grown more acute since I was away. Every race start seems to take 5 or minutes to load while we wait for, I would guess, some guy in Tierra del Feugo on his 14.4Kbps dial-up connection to get ready.

You will see 8 players in the pre-race lineup, then the load screen comes up, and when the wait is finally over, there might be 5 or 6 people left in the race.

That would me tolerable I suppose, except cheating/hacking in the game seems to have gotten out of control. I ran six races the other day and there was an obvious cheat/hack going on in three of them. While hardly conclusive evidence of an epidemic, it was enough to put me off racing.

And it is really bad when it is obvious enough that I can spot the pattern. On multiple lap races there appears to be a hack or exploit that allows a person to use the “add one lap” opti0n so that it applies to everybody in the race except you. And when you only have to do two laps and everybody else has to do three, guess who wins? I was neck and neck the whole time with a person who did that in one race and they won right in front of me while I still had a lap to go.

Ah well. According to the forums they are trying to fight this sort of thing, but it sure sucks the wind out of your enthusiasm when you see it happen that often.

The devs seemed to have figured out that very few people read the news and specials listed in the launcher, so they have also put news and deals in a window that comes up when you enter the world for the first time.

Wanna buy a 240Z?

I get that they need to push cash shop items… and it isn’t like I don’t get something similar in EverQuest or EverQuest II these days when I log in… but it is just one more window to close. And the important news, like “oh, we’re having a special event which is why all but six of the usual courses have disappeared from your” is absent. Priorities, I suppose.

And, finally, things have gotten blurry… but in a good way.

Warp Speed!

Now when you start going really fast in game… it seems to kick in somewhere above 100 MPH… the scenery will blur as you speed down the road. That sounds a bit silly, but it is an interesting effect, as the distortion radiates out from the center of your view, growing more pronounced as you read the edge of your vision. But it seems maybe a little more Star Trek than Street Racer. Plus, as you can see in the picture above, other cars on the road remain oddly in focus relative to the scenery. The overall effect is strange.

So Need for Speed World is still around and appears to be getting regular updates like any healthy MMO. And with any MMO, when you have been away for a while, upon returning the world feels like it has moved on without you.

Raptr Gets Analytical or Only 18,999 Hours to Go!

Raptr put up a several blog posts and sent me two email messages, all about the new stuff they are launching that lets you… well… compare your epeen against your friends. Click on the picture below to see it in full size.

Raptr looks at my games...

I think Raptr must be primarily a console gamers destination if 36 games on my system puts me 26 games ahead of the average Raptr PC user. Either that or Steam users… those of us who must resist their insane sales… are not well represented.

And the last bit, my summary, makes me think they haven’t quite got their system tuned:

Lightning Bolt! You and 0% of Raptr users have more RPG games than anything else in their game library. You put on your robe and wizard hat…

I suppose it depends on how you define the games. I notice that that Raptr still seems shy about calling out MMORPGs. Of course, that might be because MMORPG players are batshit insane. I offer this up as proof.

While I might be an Elite World of Warcraft player, I have still been measured and found short a whopping 18,999 hours and/or achievements to be the #1 WoW player on Raptr. If we take that as just hours of play, that is over two years of constant, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week play.

Meanwhile, on the EVE Online front, I am 103 hours shy of Elite status.

Other games in which I rank as elite for one reason or another:

Lord of the Rings Online
Rift
Need for Speed: World
Defense Grid: The Awakening
EverQuest II Extended

Elite status seems to be a pretty arbitrary thing.

Addendum: And if you want to be my friend on Raptr, I am wilhelm2451, as usual.

Looking Back at 2011 – Highs and Lows

Last week I looked forward to figure out where I might be headed online game-wise in the new year. That list was filled with a lot of not-quite-MMOs.

Now it is time to look back at what came to pass in 2011, or at least what came to pass from my vantage point in this little corner of the gaming world. So, as I did last year, I present you with a lot of bullet points in no particular order.

Turbine

Highs:

LOTRO is still there, still has wonderful Middle-earth charm, still has some of the best role-play tools available in any MMORPG.
Their games survived and thrived post free-to-play.
They got a nice new chunk of Middle-earth on the map with Rise of Isengard.
I made it to freakin’ Moria at last!!11 one one one

Lows:

Their stuff still doesn’t feel as polished as WoW or Rift, which is bad in a still-growing field of competitors.
Their character models, awkward at launch, are not aging well at all.
I am still in Moria and have no plan to buckle down and get to Mirkwood, much less Isengard.
They shipped their last new game when?

Sony Online Entertainment

Highs:

I say this every year, but EQ still lives! 12 years in and still going!
Time locked progression servers brought back a healthy slice of that MMO nostalgia goodness!
I got to partake in that goodness with Potshot for a while… and it was damn good!
EQ got a new expansion with things like parcel delivery through the mail, more zones, five new levels, and hotbars that look like they are now from this century.
EQII still does a ton of things better than other games, like housing interiors.
SOE reconciled the Live/Extended split so there is, again, but one ~~Popeye~~ EverQuest II.
EQII got a new expansion and actually added a new class, beastlords, to the game after seven years.
Star Wars Galaxies goes out with dignity and some fond memories.
Planetside 2 announced!
Vanguard is actually getting some attention!

Lows:

That whole PSN/SOE hacking thing. It killed our momentum on Fippy Darkpaw and made SOE look bad in general.
The nostalgia marketing effort around the EQ progression servers started weak and then totally disappeared once they went live. A 12 year old game has a big nostalgia card to play, but SOE chose to pretty much ignore it the day after the Time Locked Progression servers were launched.
The behavior of some players on the TLP servers reminded us all why we went to instanced dungeons in the first place, plus a lot of other old arguments sprang up anew on the forums. Too much nostalgia.
Hey EQ team, haven’t items through the mail been on every MMO since 2004? What took you so long?
EQII still pisses me off with a myriad of stupid little things, like why is “auto loot” when solo and “auto greed” when in a group the same setting. I want to do one but not another. The game has more settings than any MMO I have ever played, yet felt the need to combine these two?
EQII pissed off members of the instance group and pretty much closed the door on us ever going back there again.
SOE remains amazingly unprepared to announce things. The whole merger of EQII Live and Extended brought up a couple dozen questions, the immediate answers to which were, “Uh… we need to think about that.”
I still cannot get past level 60 or so in EQII before becoming bored.
There were layoffs and the death of The Agency.
Who decided that a double station cash event was a great idea three days after a triple station cash event?
Planetside 2? Was the original popular enough to spawn a sequel?
Star Wars Galaxies… Lucas pulls the plug, leaves SOE to clean up the mess.

CCP

Highs:

The EVE Online CSM actually does some good, gets management to focus on EVE fundamentals.
CCP management actually turns things around for the next EVE expansion.
Crucible moves the game forward by fixing what we already had.
Oh, hey, I am in null sec! Bet you didn’t see that one coming!
Dust 514 looks like it might become real giving CCP… two games.

Lows:

Arrogance, blindness, and Incarna nearly lead the company off a cliff.
Over-extension of resources meant layoffs and the long-term postponement of a World of Darkness based MMO.
EVE is back on the right course… but there are still times when the game is dull. I had to buy Peggle to play while sitting and watching local.
Dust 514 makes sense I guess… CCP clearly has to focus… but with their customer base all on the PC, was going to a console game really the right move?

Blizzard

Highs:

WoW still has more players than any other subscription MMO you play… not that there are many of those left.
Still immensely profitable.
Has plans for pandas. My daughter is all over that.
Oh, and they shipped Star Craft II in the last decade… and are talking about Diablo III and some new game.

Lows:

WoW is down 2 million players since this time last year.
Cataclysm malaise and the killing of game nostalgia by redoing the world we started with. Can they ever do a WoW progression server now?
The slow response time of Blizzard, which worked out fine when things were going good, is starting to work against them.
Pandas? That was the big news in 2011 from Blizzard?
Did they ship a freakin’ thing in 2011? Does Blizzard and its huge profit margin exist simply to keep Activision from losing money every quarter where they do NOT ship a version of Call of Duty?

Trion Worlds

Highs

Rift actually turned out to be well executed. It is like somebody learned from the last dozen years of MMO foibles.
Comfortable and polished enough to pick up and hold on to some defectors from WoW.
Public quests… rifts and invasions… done in the way that Warhammer Online should have.
Turned out to be a good place for the instance group to call home for now.

Lows:

It is, really, just another fantasy MMORPG in the WoW model. If it had shipped against Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King I am not sure it would have been as successful.
Nothing in Trion’s next acts has me interested.

Steam

Highs:

I am beginning to reconcile myself with Steam. I am still not fully on board, but I see the utility of the system as a platform to distribute games.
Wow, they put a lot of games on sale for real cheap over the summer and this winter.
Steam achievements are… something I guess.

Lows:

The internet went down for a couple hours last week and guess what I couldn’t do? Play any of my games on Steam! And, of course, Steam is where most of the single player games I would want to play when the internet goes down are. This is the part I cannot reconcile.
Just because a game is marked down from $29.99 to $3.74 does not mean I will like it. I have a lot of very inexpensive games that I do not like now that I simply wouldn’t have purchased at all were it not for a Steam sale. Victory for the developer and Steam there, not for me. Steam now represents the greatest collection of games I do not play on my current PC.
Why in the hell did I buy the entire Pop-Cap catalog? I know it was marked down 84%, but I really only wanted Peggle. Damn you Steam! And damn me for violating the “never buy anything online after dark” rule.
How often does Team Fortress 2 get updates? Steam was updating it so frequently I had to uninstall it.

Free to Play Movement

Highs:

Lots of free to play games out there to sample, like World of Tanks, League of Legends, and Need for Speed World, and a lot more are promised.
Older games are getting a new breath of life via an influx of new players via this model. It seemed to do wonders for EverQuest II.
Facebook… there were sure a lot of new games there.
Lord British is now the self-designated champion of light platforms and free to play.

Lows:

To one degree or another, the current consensus on the business model seems to be that a company must bestow some sort of advantage on or remove some annoyance from players who pay. It is accelerated experience and golden bullets that support most of the games I see, with the selling of actual content far behind in the pack. And the idea of supporting a game entirely based on cosmetic items sales appears to be a myth on par with Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster.
The games that I play that converted to free to play were the ones I played when they were subscription based. Time is still the biggest tax on my ability to play games.
That a game is free to play does not make it fun to play. A business model can ruin fun, but it can rarely create fun.
Is there any game idea that has not yet been screwed up in attempting to bring it to Facebook?
Lord British is now the self-designated champion of light platforms and free to play

Players, Blogs, and Community

Highs:

Players, like those in EVE Online, show that a group with limited, rational objectives can make their voices heard and see their demands met. #Occupy protestors take note.
Community and playing together is not dead. Thrown into the EverQuest progression servers, people got together, formed groups, and played nicely… for a while.
Hey, we all like to comment on each others blogs! Thanks for taking the time to leave comments on mine.

Lows:

Every time I go into a game’s official forums, I am saddened. This is surely a symptom of the human condition.
EverQuest progression servers were a self-selected population of those who wanted most to group up and play nicely… and that has devolved into all the problems that made the WoW model of solo content and instances so popular. Remember that when you have your rose colored glasses out.
For every rational discussion where consensus is reached I see in a blog comment thread, there has to be a dozen cases of the complete inability to see the other person’s perspective or even admit that it exists. Can we get over that please?
I am still not sure which is worse, people complaining bitterly about a game they do not play and do not understand, or people complaining bitterly about people who do not like their game de jour. Of course, they are often the same people on both counts, so at least they are easy to spot and ignore.
Most of the problems in-game… in any game… such as hacking, cheating, bad behavior, poor community, illicit RMT, and the state of official game forums are all pretty much our own damn fault. Can we promise to try to behave better next year?

So that was 2011, at least from where I sit. Yes, I failed to mention SWTOR, but I think that is really part of 2012. There is still too much new game euphoria for me to get any feel for how things are going, especially since I am not playing.

Still, trying to recall a whole year, even with the blog open in front of my for reference, is doomed to failure. What did I miss? What came to pass in 2011 that I should have remembered?

October 2011 in Review

The Site

I think the biggest internal site news was when WordPress.com made some change and messed up my stats for a few days.

Well, I hear they messed up a lot of people’s stats.

For the last five years page views have been counted in pretty much the same way. I’ve kept them all in a spread sheet, every single day, since I started the blog. The consistency is verifiable via third party page view counters I have used off and on.

Then, on the 18th, something new crept into the mix.

Basically, page views have been counted and displayed on the stats panel in a way such that the total page views for a given day were displayed in two places. One is the big chart at the top of the statistics page (a section of which is shown above) and the other is in a table that breaks out which posts were viewed how many times, including the main page.

These two charts always added up, until October 18, when suddenly people started asking why they were getting so many page referrals from WordPress.com and why those referrals seemed to be added into the total on the big chart, but were clearly absent from the Posts and Pages table. (The sum worked out to exactly WordPress.com referrals + Posts and Pages total = Big chart value.)

So the Posts and Pages table, for the three days indicated with arrows in the picture above, showed the same number of page views (well, not exactly, the tallest column is actually over 100 views less), while the main page views chart showed very different results.

This became a burning question on the help forums where the main volunteer who handles the forum, in a demonstration of getting exactly what you pay for, was less helpful and more clueless than usual.

Eventually one of the paid staff (Macmanx the Hapless Engineer) came along and said that they had started including pages viewed via email subscriptions RSS in the mix, and this was where the boost in page views came from. Since RSS tops site visits by 4 or 5 to 1, that seemed possible. He said that views not getting matched to actual posts would be fixed soon, and off he went.

Then, a couple of days later, the founder of WordPress.com showed up and said, no, this wasn’t just RSS views.

Hey guys — founder of WordPress.com here.

Good news: We’ve historically been vastly undercounting your stats, and we’re starting to fix this.

Bad news: There are some bugs with how things add up, meaning that they don’t. I apologize for undue excitement this may have caused.

More good news: Although support is closed, we’re working on this. We’ll fix it ASAP.

When asked why the sudden boost in views did not match what third party counters were reporting (like my flag viewer on the side bar, which lined up almost exactly with the Pages & Posts report of page views for the 21st), he blustered about such page view counters being inaccurate and eventually said that all page view counts were just approximations and no two would ever match.

Tell that to the people who get paid for page views and the like. I am sure that would make them very happy to use WordPress.com stats.

And then the next day wordpress.com referrals in the stats started to fade away, so by the 26th things were pretty much back to normal and the great mid-October page view spike was over. (Other people posted pictures with similar spikes.)

In my WordPress.com stats, October 21, 2011 is now listed as my best day ever. However, I am pretty sure that June 29, 2011 is still the actual champion, which happened at the peak of the great Incarna bitch-fest.

And life goes on.

One Year Ago

I had some hopes and expectations for BlizzCon. There were pretty much unmet. But Blizzard had already announced the Cataclysm ship date, so what else did I expect?

I asked if people ever look at the items in the blog side-bar. People mostly do not.

I finished building my new computer. It has been live a year and Windows 7 hasn’t completely degraded into a pile of blue-screening ooze the way XP used to when not constantly attended to.

The EVE Online screen shot contest wrapped up, winners were declared and prizes were sent out.

The instance group was playing in LOTRO, which had been live as a Free to Play game for one month. In-game, we were subjected to the disturbing habits of some of the residents of the Lone Lands, while I indulged in one of my own habits, the mid-game character swap. And then I made one post completely unreadable by making anagrams out of all the proper nouns. I had to repost a corrected version.

I bought Civilization V, which like every Civilization launch, had issues with my current computer. The unwritten rule of Civilization is that you need to upgrade your machine in order to play.

And my daughter and I were drinking new and interesting sodas.

Five Years Ago

Five years ago our Saturday night WoW group completed our first full instance run, The Deadmines, on our third try at it, and got in a whack at The Wailing Caverns.

I decided in EVE Online that covert ops would be a good career choice. It certainly sounds cool. However, the effort was cut short when I got to some of the pricier skills.

I felt that fall urge to run around in EverQuest, plus I wanted to take some pictures of Faydwer in order to compare them to the upcoming EverQuest II expansion, Echoes of Faydwer.

I also jumped into EverQuest II and got all confused (nothing new there) about the trade skill changes that occurred during the 10 months I was away.

I was defending instancing and game company forums as well as moaning about the fact that I couldn’t find a decent video card for my AGP motherboard.

There was some talk about which pen and paper RPGs would make good MMOs.

And I spent some time carping about MMO pricing plans. I still feel about the same on the subject five years later.

New Linking Sites

I would like to thank the following site for linking here.

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in October

Spam Comments of the Month

I’m just done looking at your posting and I fairly enjoyed it….
[A long comment from somebody linking back to “Write Comments, Get Paid.” I wonder if he got paid.]

i cant believe you are coming to Burlington, VT !!! andddd Albany, NY. im totally going to see you twice!
[Not if I see you first.]

Search Terms of the Month

3d gay porn
[Sorry, I don’t cover Second Life here.]

lou attack report
[Who did Lou attack?]

EverQuest

I have written enough about EverQuest this month that you might think I am actually playing it. But I am not. I am, however, keeping as close an eye on the Progression Servers as I can manage and reporting on forum fun. I hope, in the end, to have a decent sketch of what happened on the Progression Servers based on that. You can keep an eye on the Fippy Darkpaw tag for the story as it unfolds.

Need for Speed World

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am starting to play this less and less. Not a bad game, and it really can be free to play, but there just isn’t much to do once you’ve sort of hit the walls that surround the world.

Rift

The instance group is slowly coming online with Rift. The general reaction from the group has been positive. Primarily that has been about the look and feel, which stands up to WoW level of polish, unlike EverQuest II and Lord of the Rings Online which, for all their merits, are still rough around the action bar.

TorilMUD

There was some excitement generated by big changes at TorilMUD. A bunch of people surged back on, dug out old characters or rolled up new ones, and then said, “I seem to remember this being a lot more fun.”

Well, that is what I said in any case. There is still a lot to love about MUDs, but it was a time of very raw fun and few online multiplayer fantasy roleplaying options.

As a sign of how things have changed, TorilMUD had a double experience event this past weekend.

World of Warcraft

All this talk of pandas, pets, and BlizzCon got my daughter and I to resubscribe. She really wanted to play, and when she plays I play. We ended up doing a bit of the Hallow’s End stuff because she wanted the creepy crate pet.

Other Games

Facebook games in general, and Zynga games in particular, are really fading with me. I used to try every Zynga game, then every other, then every third or so.

I end up playing them all about the same amount of time, but they seem to be cranking them out faster and faster. I think this might be hurting them.

Two years, Zynga meant FarmVille and Mafia Wars. They had a strong identity. Today Zynga is a new game a month and I couldn’t tell you what the stand-out game for them really is.

I am sure there is a lesson in that.

Anyway, my Empires & Allies neighbors will have to understand. I left everything harvestable, so they can reap (literally) the benefits of visiting, but I am done.

I have been playing some Civilization II, now that I have it working on Windows 7 64-bit. I miss some of the enhancements that came with the later games… and unit pathing just sucks… I have to find the patch that fixed some of that… but it is light and clean and still a damn good game.

And, finally, I have been meaning to write about Defense Grid: The Awakening, a $10 tower defense game on Steam. But every time I go to write about it, I launch it and just end up playing. I have thought about picking up Dungeon Defenders, because I like the tower defense genre, but I doubt I would play it any time soon because I am not done with Defense Grid yet.

Coming Up

Well, the instance group will actually have to do something together in Rift.

There is a screen shot contest to judged! You still have until November 6th to get your Azeroth travel poster submitted!

I am sure there will be something to note on Fippy Darkpaw. Right now the forums are just boiling about the whole rotation thing, but there might even be a vote on the next expansion, the Shadows of Luclin. If waking the sleeper was the gating item to trigger the vote. If it was “finish all tasks listed on the chart,” then… well… all those tasks are not done yet, and we’re still stuck on Velious.

And we’re getting to the end of the year wrap-up season. All those predictions… erm demands… will be coming home to roost. For some of them, the companies were listening, while on others I apparently did not make myself clear.

Need for Speed World – Likes and Dislikes

I think my affair with Need for Speed World is running out of steam.

I have been playing the game pretty regularly for a couple of month now, logging in for a bit almost every evening. I have played enough to make it up to level 25, which is about 20 more levels than anybody else on my very short friends list in-game.

But lately I have started skipping a night or two or three.

That is generally the sure sign that interest is waning. I can kid myself about whether I like a game or not, but I simply won’t go play games I do not like or feel I am done with.

But while the game is still somewhat fresh in my mind, I thought I would list out what I liked about the game and what… well… irked me.

What I Liked

1 – Free to Play

Honestly, if this game were not free, or if it required me to buy a box or otherwise lay down money up front, I would mostly likely not be playing. But it is free and sans velvet ropes as far as I can tell. You can drive around, race, get in police chases, and all that just like somebody who spent money on the game.

2 – Driving Fast

For the simple goal of driving fast around a city/country road network, this game is all I need. I spend some of my time doing the daily gem hunt, enraging the local law enforcement, and racing. But I spent a good chunk of my time just driving fast.

3 – Lack of Realism

As I drive around fast, I often hit things. Some times on purpose… it is tough to race past a row of parking meters without mowing them down… and some times on accident. Some times I find out that 150 MPH is too fast for the corner in question and I smash into the landscape.

But the smash up isn’t the end of my fun. There is no need for a tow truck or a return to the garage. You just point the front end of the car in the right direction and carry on.

You have the option to show some visual damage, but I turned that off. My car is always as shiny and new as when I started. Eventually damage takes its toll and performance begins to degrade, but that is nothing a quick return to your safe house and a bit of cash for repairs cannot cure.

The game seems intent on keeping you driving as much as possible.

4 – Destructible Terrain

As noted above, and mentioned before, it is hard for me to really pass along the sheer joy of knocking over parking meters, stop signs, lamp posts, fire hydrants, garbage cans, and other bits of scenery. And then there are the big items, the billboards, water towers, giant signs, and other things that will actually fall in the road and stop traffic and/or foil pursuers.

There is even a college campus you can race across smashing the trappings of the academic environment (somebody seems to have left a lot of rolling white boards out and about), a bus station with large plate glass windows to smash through, and the ever popular exploding gas stations.

It Goes BOOM!

5 – Retro Cars

I was a bit worried when the looking at the initial car list that all vehicles in the game would be “modern,” which to my mind is any vehicle made after I purchased my first new off the lot vehicle… which was in 1987.

But no, the game has thrown out a couple of very nice retro choices, enough for me to actually throw down some real money on them via their SpeedBoost micro-transaction currency. So now I have a 73 Nissan Skyline GT-R, a 74 VW Golf GTI, a 70 Chevy Chevelle 454, and a 67 Corvette in my in-game garage. Good stuff all around.

6 – Lots of Race Courses

That is the one thing the game seems to offer you as you level up, access to ever more race courses.

The race courses are actually sections of the world map that appear in an instance for races you can compete in either against computer opponents or live players. Each new course has its own quirks and getting to know them is part of the competitive game.

7 – Customization

Probably the best aspect of the game is the amount to which you are allowed to customize your car. Driving around, you will see an amazing array of paint and sticker designs on cars. People spend a lot of time on this aspect of the game, and it is one of the things that is pretty open without paying money.

Pimpmobile!

There are aspects that are locked out, some special bits that you need SpeedBoost to obtain… like window tint for some odd reason… but the tools left to your disposal with in-game cash are still impressive. And a lot of people take full advantage of it.

Some need a little more imagination

What Irks Me

1 – Pay to Win

I am throwing this in less as an issue I have with the game than an issue you have to hear people gripe about a lot. (Though it still slaps me in the face every so often.)

There is an element of pay to win in the game. When you buy a car with the micro-transaction currency, SpeedBoost, it comes fully equipped with high end parts and from the moment you take possession of it you are equipped to win.

You can often (but not always) buy a comparable car with in-game cash and equip it with special drops and get close to store bought performance, but there is a layer of cars that you just cannot seem to touch with in-game items.

That said, there is an element of skill to the game, and having the best car does not mean victory. I have beat out any number of cars that were statistically much better than my own. I usually do that by following the #1 rule of racing: Don’t run into stuff. A good chunk of my victories were less about what other people were doing and driving and more about my simply avoiding being slowed down by contact with other racers, track debris, obstacles, and the ever present NPC traffic on the roads where you race.

But sometimes you are equally skilled, or maybe a little more skilled, but he put down money for a Porsche 959 while you’re thrashing your little Golf GTI just to keep up and money carries the day.

2 – Lack of Realism

This is one of those things that is good in the right dose. Sometimes when I am in a level 5 police pursuit and I’ve smashed through dozens of road blocks, put even more police cruisers out of action, and my vehicle is literally surfing on a sea of black and whites seeking to bring me to justice, I start to wonder if I might be a bit too invulnerable.

Surf the Fuzz!

Plus the fact that every car in the game is rear wheel drive pisses me off. I did not notice this at first, since I tend towards the more retro aspect of the game, which tends towards rear wheel drive. But then I got that ’74 VW Golf GTI and noticed it was burning rubber from the rear tires. That just sucks.

Oh, and I want to be able to honk my horn. Is that too much to ask?

3 – Picture Time

If you have read this blog for a while, you might have noticed I have a real attachment to screen shots. Rare is the post about a game that does not include some sort of picture. I mean, I put in pictures of maps of zones from text based MUDs.

This stems from being a visual person. When I look back at old posts and read about an encounter, it is made much more alive in my mind with a picture of the event.

So the screen shot situation in NFSW pisses me off.

First, you cannot turn off the damn UI. Not that I want it off in every picture… it is nice to be able to see I was breaking 100 MPH on the fairway of a golf course… but sometimes you want a glamor shot, something for, say, a travel poster!

But that isn’t the bad part.

The bad part is that the camera is fixed looking at the rear end of your car and you cannot change that without some serious street maneuvers. I have a lot of screen shots of my cars mid-bootleg turn because the camera takes a second to catch up, so for a brief moment I can see the side of my car.

Chevelle Bootleg!

Not that I do not enjoy doing bootleg turns, but I really want to be able to turn off the UI and unlock the camera to take screen shots of my car. That, however, is not allowed.

Now, some might point out that there are special locations within the game that allow you better camera control so you can take pictures of your car. This is true. And they all seem to be in sports arenas, because that is where people take pictures of cars I guess… on football fields and baseball diamonds.

Usually I am doing donuts here…

Anyway, I hate that I can customize my car’s look to down to such detail, and then can’t take a decent picture of it out on the road while I am driving.

4 – Small Map

The map seems pretty big when you finally unlock the last bits of it around level 10 or so. (After that, the level unlocks seem to be limited to new race courses.) But when you are zipping along at triple digit speeds, you start to find that you can move from one side of the map to the other in a pretty short time.

There are a couple of points where the road appears to be headed off the map, but you are blocked. I kept hoping the areas beyond the blocks would open up, but they have not so far. Perhaps those are place holders for an expansion? I do not know.

But I do know I have driven every mile of the blacktop in game at this point (plus the golf course), and I would like some new spaces in which to play.

5 – Isolation

The loneliness of the long distance racer.

In a way, this is the game being too realistic. Everybody in game is in their car, alone, and driving around. It is like the commute. Lots of people around you and nobody to talk to.

It is like EVE, everybody alone in their spaceship, only worse, since EVE has a better chat system. No, really.

Oh, there is the common chat channel, which gets partitioned into dozens of channels to keep the spaminess down to a dull roar, which means if you roll by somebody and what to say something, you need to catch their name or right click on them so you can send them a whisper, because they are unlikely to be on the same channel as you. Only you’re both likely in motion, so the moment of opportunity flashes by quickly.

So I have spent a lot of time in the game, yet I know absolutely nobody in-game. And, as we well know, one of the key points to retaining players in MMOs is the social bond they have with their fellow players. I have no such bond, so walking away is easy.

6 – Under-populated Races

You end up with lots of different race courses to try, but I have found that a lot of the courses do not get much use.

The early courses are heavily populated, and getting into a race with a full grid of 8 players is pretty easy. But as you get into the higher level courses, opponents become more and more rare. I have sat for 30 minutes waiting for somebody else to join me on a new course, though that is rare. More common is to queue up for a course and end up in a two or three player race.

I do not mind the two or three player races too much. They are not as exciting generally as a full eight, but they can be good, at least until you get matched up solo against the level 50 guy in the Porsche 959 and the 90% win rate and you wonder if you’ll even be able to keep his tail lights in view.

And don’t get me started on hackers.

30 Second laps? Hacker!

7 – Simply Not Enough to Do

This, for me, is the final item because it is the most important. It is the reason I have been slowing down with the game, logging in less and less.

There just isn’t that much to do.

Fast driving is good. I can do that for 15 minutes to unwind, tear down the freeways, carve through the side streets, and generally get my need for speed satisfied.

The daily gem hunt is fine, though having done it for 25 days in a row, I am pretty sure I have all the hiding places down now and I have managed to find all 15 gems in about 3 minutes. (The game keeps track of first gem to last gem time.)

Racing can be a blast, but it is hard to find a good race on higher level courses.

And you can only do so many police chases in a night.

Which leaves… what? Not much.

I wish there was something else. A pursuit game. A game of fox hunt or U-boat.

Final Thoughts

There are other things less than wonderful about the game about which little can be done. Cars driven by other players tend to be erratic and all over the road… and their front tires seem to be cranked over hard for a left hand turn while driving straight ahead… making racing against live players sometimes more annoying than exhilarating.

But that is more a sign of the reality of the internet than the game. I end up in races with people spanning three continents on a regular basis, so I am pretty happy we can race together at all, even if it means that sometimes the guy three car lengths behind me in the final stretch sometimes jumps ahead of me and beats me without warning.

The game is very international, which is a good thing. Everybody plays on one server, something managed by clever instancing and partitioning. It isn’t uncommon for me to be able to identify four or five languages in the main chat channel on any given night. Spanish, English, and Portuguese are very common, with French, German, and Russian showing up regularly.

All in all, it is a pretty good game. There are trade offs where things had to be kept simple in order to satisfy a broad range of player machines and locations, but it can be a lot of fun.

I just wish there was more to do in the game.

EA Unifying Online Currencies for Play4Free Titles

Over at the Need for Speed World home page, there was a little news item I hadn’t seen any place else so far.

Electronic Arts is going to unify the currencies used for… most of their Play4Free titles.

Play4Free has six titles under its banner:

Of those titles, the following four are going to be merged into a single currency that will be shared across games using the same account. Since EA has been on the great account merger hunt, which came as a bit of a shock when they merged my Star Wars: The Old Republic account into another account, all the EA games I play, plus Origin, EA’s new digital distribution platform, are now on a single login.

I am not sure I like that. I certainly want an authenticator for my EA account, since getting into one gets you into them all, so I have to worry about their low rent web games paying as much attention to security as their triple-A MMO. I am sure that seemed like a good idea to somebody.

Gimme that thing there!

Anyway, the following four currencies will be going away.

Lord of Ultima currency: diamonds
Need for Speed World currency: speedboost
Battlefield Heroes currency: battlefunds
Battlefield Play4Free currency: battlefunds

Those four will be replaced by a new currency which will be called… and this is really a sign of creativity at EA… Play4Free Funds.

Yeah, somebody in marketing got a bonus for that I’m sure.

As for the other two… well, Dragon Age Legends is on Facebook, so if it uses any currency, it is probably Facebook Credits. And BattleForge… I don’t know why that isn’t on the list. But I have never tried it, so no matter.

In a way, this might be a good thing for me. I have some diamonds in Lord or Ultima, which I stopped playing since updates killed the game for me (I was going to write about that, wasn’t I?) which I might now prefer to use in Need for Speed World.

There is no word on the exchange rate… how much I will get in Play4Free Funds from my diamonds and speedboost… nor has there been any hint on what the new pricing schemes will look like both in and out of game. But EA had better have that all lined up because this whole consolidation is supposed to go live on November 16, 2011.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Category Archives: Need for Speed World

January 2013 in Review

December 2012 in Review

The Long Lancia – More Fun in Need for Speed World

Holiday Fun in Need for Speed World

Peeking in on Need for Speed World

Raptr Gets Analytical or Only 18,999 Hours to Go!

Looking Back at 2011 – Highs and Lows

October 2011 in Review

Need for Speed World – Likes and Dislikes

What I Liked

What Irks Me

EA Unifying Online Currencies for Play4Free Titles