Quickies Get Massive

More movement on the massive scale. WoW Players should be aware that Patch 1.7 was released today. It's a big one, with a new raid instance, Hunter changes, and the inclusion of a new type of server (Roleplaying PVP) available. Get downloading. City of Heroes has seen Issue 5's Release, with a new zone, new power sets, and a big tweak to the Blaster archetype. Late last week a whole bunch of new City of Villains Beta invites went out, and Gamespot has a rundown on the upcoming stand-alone sequel. Major changes are afoot in Everquest II's Producer Letter, with changes to combat, classes, items, NPCs, buffs, crafting, and grouping. Is it even the same game? On a final non-commercial note, CNet has news that the Second Life virtual world is now free to enter, with the Linden Dollars economy expected to prop up the costs associated with running it. Interesting. From that article: "Currently, Rosedale said, "Second Life" has 45,000 members and is growing at about 10 percent a month. There are now more than 16,000 acres of owned land in the virtual world, and new land sells for about $129. Users must pay a fee of about $25 a month to maintain their land. Thus, Linden Lab is earning about $400,000 a month without ever factoring in membership fees." Update: 09/14 05:50 GMT by Z : Cutriss rightly points out that I overlooked the interesting Ballista Royale update to FFXI. Additionally, a new patch for Dark Age of Camelot was released today, and the main site revamped for the upcoming expansion.

Comments

I'll give it another shot

[QuantumG]

Second Life is a shopping mall with no actual gameplay, but what the hell, I'll give it another go. Maybe I'll actually find someone this time who can show me the 1% of user created content that isn't shit.

Re:I'll give it another shot

[QuantumG]

Ok, I've played it all day long. I'm still bored out of my god damn mind. What's worse though, I've come to recognise what the future will be like. When we all have access to programmable matter, the world will look like Second Life - a wasteland of absentee land owners dictating what you can and can't do on their land. You'll try to pick something up and the operating system of Earth will intercept your actions and stop you whispering gently into your brain "the owner of this object has not granted you permission to pick it up". To put it in collocial terms, physical objects in the future will have DRM built in. Welcome to the opposite of freedom.

If you're interested in the PvP/RP server..

[wuie]

don't bother right now with it. The queues are already 600+ with people waiting for hours just to login and make a character. Blizzard limited the maximum size of the server's capacity so that starting areas won't be jam-packed. Wait a couples days or a week until making a character.

Re:If you're interested in the PvP/RP server..

[geminidomino]

Heh. How's that for irony. The one thing that could have possibly convinced me to renew.

Maybe in a few months, when it's clear whether or not the RP/PvP servers are the same unenforced Clusterfucks that the RP servers are.

Re:$25 a month, isn't a bit stiff for a MMORPG?

[joechip]

The game without land is free. You can get an account with a small amount of land (512sm) for $9.95 a month ($7.50/mo quarterly, $6/mo. if you pay a year at a time). That small bit of land is essentially free, as you can buy it with your "starter money."

If you want more land, there is a tiered monthly fee structure beyong the normal fee. Land can cost you anywhere between $L3-$L5/sm. The $L is currently trading around $US3.50 per $L1000.

Alan Palmerstone - SL resident since June 2004.

I5 for COH

[MagicDude]

Issue 5 for City of Heroes has not gone over well with most of the players. Many people are very critical of the massive nerfing that took place with this issue across all of the archtypes (better known as classes). As well, COH is still lacking in any kind of end game content. Once you get the level 50, the only thing there is to do from there is to roll up a new character and start over. I believe this is the effect of what is probably COH's most unique qualities, no economy. There is no loot huntning in the game, which I think makes the game more enjoyable with no griefing or spawn camping or doing the same quest over and over again because the ending boss has a 2% change of dropping the legendary boots of butt kicking. Your only job is to go out there and bring villians to justice which is great. However, it doesn't provide your character with many incentives to get to level 50 since gameplay just hits a brick wall after that since there's no benefit to being lvl 50 in terms of making your character better. Most of the previous updates have added mainly low and mid level content, but many players are salivating for something like a lvl 50 only zone chock full of high end content, rather than your only option being to become a noob again and go do Lt. Wincott's Hollows missions for the 5th time.

Second life may be free, but still requires cc...

[stienman]

Second life may be free, but it still requires credit card information. And here I was all ready to sign up and everything.

May not be an issue for most people, but if I'm not going to pay, I'm certianly not giving them payment information.

-Adam

What about FFXI?

[Cutriss]

What is it with Slashdot and not covering FFXI? Every time there's a MMORPG wrapup, it almost always gets omitted from the newspost in favor of WOW (understandable), and then far less populated MMOs.

FFXI has the North American Ballista Royale gearing up for team-based PVP tournaments which will eventually be held on a server-versus-server tournament level. A new update will be out in October that will add new zones and expand the functionality of the NPC buddies that were added in one of the recent patches, and a host of other new things. Also, with TGS right around the corner, everyone's expecting the official announcement of the new expansion pack, which will be included on the FFXI release for the Xbox 360.

Re:What about FFXI?

[Dragoon412]

It's because FFXI is an evil, twisted, abortion of a game that's tanked miserably in the US.

FFXI requires a degree of sadism and time investment (it can literally take hours just to find a group, and this isn't rare) that seems high even in comparison to Lineage 2. The economy has been utterly devastated by farmers, and encounters (and therefore groups, which are absolutely necessary - you can't even blow your nose in FFXI without a white mage to help you) are so demanding that you often won't be admitted into a group unless you have the absolute best equipment available. Which means either, A) competing with professional farmers, B), farming for gold for days to buy the most trivial equipment, or C) shelling out to the farmers on eBay.

FFXI isn't covered because it's not a game, it's punishment in digital form; it's a damned job with no benefits and no pay. It's a game so slow, boring, repetetive, and frustrating that even old-time EverQuest players say "whoa, that's too much." "Playing" FFXI is like choing on tinfoil while a donkey kicks you in the nuts and a midget in a bondage outfit sodomizes you with a red-hot, spiked dildo.

Re:What about FFXI?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is NOT flamebait. If anything, this is glossing over the amazing turd that FFXI is on gaming.

Everything said by the parent post is completely true. Everything.

It's not popular in the US. It did tank miserably in the US and Europe. Groups do take hours upon hours to form. (And once they do, they usually rapidly break up.) The economy is dominated by farmers. There was a Slashdot article a while back about them banning eight hundred farmers. This was news because they never had before. And they never have since. Encounters are literally so demanding that you MUST have the absolute best gear or you're literally useless (unless you're the white mage, who's essential and will simply be less effective) because you'll simply never hit the opponent.

Ultimately you're left with three choices: competeing with farmers, farming trash mobs for HOURS on end because they don't drop anything useful (most popular solution), or buying from the farmers.

FFXI is a job. There's a reason they call the classes "jobs" - because playing them IS a job.

The parent post isn't Flamebait. It's Informative. Please educate yourself on just how horrendous FFXI truely is before calling it flamebait. There's a reason FFXI isn't popular in the US and Europe, and the parent post covers why very well.

If anything, he was too kind to it. It's really worse than the parent post leads you to believe.

Final Fantasy XI is a horrendous game, and it simply isn't worthy of Slashdot coverage in any way, shape, or form - other than the really silly things (like when it got blocked because it was using port 25 to connect) which are just tech news.

Extra content, no monthly fee

[spyrochaete]

Let's not forget this week's Sorrow's Furnace update to Guild Wars

Re:Second life may be free, but still requires cc.

[andy_fish]

I agree that it's annoying. But in this case, it's not a sleazy marketing thing to make it easier for you to make an impulse buy. It really is necessary. Free characters start out with a base allowance of Linden dollars, so they need the credit card check to prevent someone from making a ton of throwaway emails/accounts and harvesting the money.

Re:Second life may be free, but still requires cc.

[zztzed]

You can also use a PayPal account to sign up, but depending on how you feel about PayPal I guess that could be worse.

Progress Quest

[KingSkippus]

Yeah, brag about all your games's updates. I'm just pissed that there hasn't been any updates to Progress Quest in, like, forever. :-(

Re:$25 a month, isn't a bit stiff for a MMORPG?

[jafuser]

The title says about as much as saying "$25 a month, isn't a bit stiff for a web host?" (sic).

You can get a free account which you can use to explore and create content just like anyone else. The free account is quite sufficient for all but the most full-control-obsessed land owning requirements.

If you need to own land for your project, you can still keep your account free and rent land from other players (on negotiated terms), or you can upgrade your account to pay a monthly hosting fee to own land. You can own as little as 512 square meters for $7-10/month, or one or more whole regions for $195/month.

Keep in mind too, the company that runs SL isn't creating artificial scarcity with land like so many people assume. Each region of land (65,536 square meters) requires one server-unit of resources to be maintained for running things such as:
- the simulator itself
- the Havok physics engine
- local asset storage and transfer
- synchronizing updates to active agents within and near the region
- running hundreds or even thousands of user scripts

The result is each region requires a decent piece of hardware to run without noticably lagging the region's simulator (incurring "time dilation", slower script execution, etc).

So the title is wrong. You can enjoy SL for free. And even if you pay, there are many pricing tiers between free and a full region. According to their Land FAQ, it is $25/month only if you absolutely need to have complete ownership control over 4,608 square meters of land.

PS: BTW, An odd quirk in the current economy makes it actually profitable to buy a minimal (512 sq m landowning) annual subscription, assuming the virtual currency (L$) value holds above a L$1000:US$3 ratio. The landowning accounts receive a weekly grant of L$500. At the end of a year, that comes to L$26k, which is currently valued at more than the price of the US$72 annual subscription fee.