Slashdot Mirror
MMOGs from Several Angles
GameGirlAdvance has a look at the litigation between NCSoft and Marvel, examining exactly how infringy the character creator can let you be. The Square/Enix people are starting a roving FFXI party, to kick off later this month in CA. f13.net has an interview with Scott Brown, a developer on the upcoming car-based Auto Assault MMOG. The staple MMOG stats resource, MMOGChart.com, has been updated again by Sir Bruce. He's added several more games but doesn't have new subscription numbers for WoW or EQII.
First, I'm going to introduce you to a new sentence rule you apparently never learned. Sentences start with capital letters. "I" is always capitalized. Capital letters are not only for acronyms. Following these rules would make your post readable. As it stands, it is not.
i'm so tired of this whole SE love to JP > NA > EU.
in terms of market share the JP market share is much larger then the NA. especially toward a MMO written in JP.
similiarly the EU market share is less then the NA since the EU region has many different languages you have to either 1. port for or 2 disregard.
Square-Enix chose #2. The European version of FFXI is in English. The only thing they translated was the PlayOnline viewer, and I can't imagine why in hell it would take them a year to do it. (For non-FFXI players, the PlayOnline viewer is kind of this "shell" around FFXI. It's basically a very small set of menus to start the game and manage your account.)
By the way, I'm going to give you another lesson for free. It's called "inflation." As has been mentioned on Slashdot many times, almost all MMORPGs suffer from massive inflation.
The reason for this is simple. Money enters the economy every time you kill an enemy. It only leaves the system when you buy things from vendor NPCs.
This means that the total money supply is always rising. If you're an established character, your ability to generate money is many times higher than someone just starting. Ultimately this means that prices equalize such that new players get priced out of the game.
You can't look at a new item and say "there's no inflation" you need to look at the trends over a month or so, and the trends in FFXI have always been towards massive inflation.
I can't figure out what you're talking about when you say "power items" so I'm not going to respond to that.
By the way, WoW is better than FFXI for simple gameplay reasons. FFXI is really, really boring. Try WoW. You'd be amazed at how slow FFXI is by comparison, especially in groups.