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WoW And EVE CCGs Debut This Week
Both World of Warcraft and EVE Online will be debuting collectible card games based on their online worlds this week at Gen Con. From the EVE announcement: "CCP will have a 128-person tournament at Gen Con in Hall G of the Indianapolis Convention Center on Saturday, August 12th with cash prizes totaling $10,000. The tournament will be open to everyone and since EVE: The Second Genesis will be launched at the show, those competing will have as equal a chance of winning as possible. The tournament will be a Swiss double elimination tournament with cash prizes for the top 32 players, with additional prizes for random players between rounds. A double elimination tournament is a competition where participants are eliminated from the tournament upon having lost two matches. All players will receive a starter deck free of charge when they come to the EVE booth for a demonstration."
Now I will have something to do when not playing mmorpgs! My eating and sleeping habits have been really destructive to my ability to maintain a normal social life, in game, of course.
You take it, I don't want it...
I'm kind of curious... I've never played a card game like this, but I have played both Eve and WoW. Is there really a market for this? Blizzard seems to be hedging its bets by giving in-game items for certain cards, thus pulling in potential customers who just want a pretty hat. (Which frankly, I see as a bigger market, but I'm not exactly an expert.) But that could conceivably backfire; I wouldn't be happy that I had to go pay even more money to access parts of a game I'm already shelling out for.
Seems to me that if you really like these games, you'd rather be playing the real thing than the card game. And if you don't, these wouldn't appeal at all.
Are you going to buy one of these? Why?
Does this mean there'll be a "Server Crash" card where I get to throw all the cards off the playing area and demoralize my opponent to the point of forfeiting?
What's next? A board game made from WoW? Yeah, like people are going to sit in front of a board for hours while they painstakingly level. Then some noob (the dog) comes in and crashes the server (board) and everyone gets booted (pissed off and leaves).
This sounds quite foolish.
Here is a great card game for WoW players.
Why?
The Eve one is great if you have a hundred or some friends to play it with, and even more fun when you are playng against another group of one hundred. Combat is resolved thus: The first 100 gang up and kick one guy from the other team in the groin simultaneously. The remaining 99 on the second team then kick the crotch of a single member of the first team. Play ends when either all crotches have been kicked or the entire game falls apart, restarts, and every player has his crotch refunded by the GM.
The game gets markedly less interesting with less people. If you have only one guy to play against, for example, there are only 4 cards you can actually use.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2005/20050826h. jpg
Hail Satan
Mommy! Mommy! A Troll. Can I take it home? Please please? Can I?
I promise not to feed it. I won't forget to kick it in the shins every ten minutes. I promise! Please mommy! Can I? Can I?
Insightful.
Everyone playing EVE at gencon will be sitting around one massive, massive round table in the same game, while wow will just a lot of normal sized tables but a lot of games running at once.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
One pack of cards. That's the minimum that every single single serious WoW player will buy. Others will buy several, maybe ten or twenty, and build decks and play with their RL friends who also play WoW. There's enough people out there that the fact is it'll turn a profit. Blizzard seems to be all about profit, and occasionally making good games.
I would dare to make a forecast by saying that this CCG, if anything like the MMO, will have absolutely no replay value. I admit, I pick up my Magic: The Gathering cards every now and then and play a game with my friends, but this game... expect to get a box full of them for $5 at a garage sale in about seven years.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Hmm, Ctrl-Alt-Del knew about this over a year and a half ago!
--
Money.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
...but they wont sell them to you unless you show up with 39 friends.
In EQ2, pretty much everything you'd want as a player is available. For an extra fee, of course.
Afaik, the only thing you can't buy for hard cash so far (from Sony itself, not EBay) is top level accounts. Everything else is available, from extra item slots to equipment.
So yes, I'd say there's a market for it. And yes, it pisses players off (i.e. me) to the extent that they drop the game altogether.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No Bones for Macro farmers?
This couldnt be further away from the truth. Macro farming or macro mining in Eve-Online is as rampant as ever if not more. CCP has never massively banned macro miners because according to an official statement they do not have the man-power required to monitor user activities and enforce banning. Their counter argument to macro farmers is that the pvp nature of the game leaves policing to the hands of players. Why would paying customers have to deal with macro farmers on their own instead of the game company if not for their incompetience with such manner?
CCP's rationale for complacency regarding macro farmers is inherently flawed. In WoW macro farmers sell in game gold for real life money. While Eve Online has its share of such problems, a majority of ISK (game mony) to real life money or vice versa can be accomplished by purchasing Game Time Codes from authorized CCP resellers which can be in turn sold for ISK to other eve players. A practice that is protected by CCP against scammers. They will refund your ISK if you purchased a fake time code or one that doesnt work. A large amount of Eve players simply stayed in the game because they can use their ISK to puchase game time without ever having to pay real life money. This makes a lot of people who are already dis-interested in the game stay because they have ISK to spare and would care less if they log on or not.
Macro Farming in WoW can be viewed as a way to generate real life income. In Eve Online, macro mining specifically is used to generate advantage for alliances against each other. If you have played Eve you will get to learn that mining is an incredibly boring activity especially for people who do not own multiple accounts or have access to the best available mining belts. Alliances are player created entities (such as Guild) that can compete with each other in fighting. However, alliances often have problem competing with each other because everything you use to fight in Eve requires building materials and having a greater supply of these materials means alliance domination.
Thus in Eve the alliances that dont macro farm die off while the ones that macro farm excessively maintained their edge since beta where a few player run manufacturing corps dominated the game since then. The problem with their blueprint distribution (required to build the best equipments) is the subject of another story. This game is inherently broken and is run by a few UO/DAoC guilds that moved on to Eve that dominates both the economy and the fighting aspects of the game where new players have little or no ground to stand on unless you enroll in one of their noob training corps and become a slave to their agendas where you have little or no say. Many players have simply quit the game after they are done with the typical newbie materials.
Eve macro farmers can play some card games and enjoy the game for a change. Puts on his T2 tinfoil hat!
EVE: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/24085
WOW: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/19643
Clearly he did not mention lag in Eve. It is like 100 players sitting on the same table sipping tea while waiting 10+ minutes for the next card to be dealt. Some of these guys are even playing WoW cardgame on the side.