A long time ago when I played Asherons Call I remember there being huge world events, like the pvp God entering the world turning all the water to blood until he was killed, and once he got killed he didn't respawn and only one player recivied his loot. Of other memorable stuff there was a meteor crash which destroyed one of the excisting cities, and an invasion of shadows.
All those things had in commen was that I never personally saw any of it (except for the red water), and while I personally found it interesting to read about on webpages I'm sure a lot of people were unhappy never getting to see it. Perhaps that is why Blizzard have chosen another direction, and they're hardly the only MMO company to do this.
Interestingly Anarchy Online had similar events, and even had GM run quests for small groups of random people - and as far as I know Age of Conan doesn't. Which seems to suggest that perhaps the "living" world isn't as popular as it would have to be before Blizzard took it seriously.
As for gnomeregan, I agree it's about time the gnomes got their city back - but then again - it'd take quite a lot of work to create the capitol of the gnomes and that's deveolment time which would come out of creating new content.
Aslong as SPORE includes the same 3 activation DRM policy which Mass Effect did there is no reason to buy the product.
I purchased Mass Effect for PC, and I can blame noone other than myself for not getting into it's DRM policy but I frankly didn't think any company would ever do something like it. You see, Mass Effect (and SPORE) comes with 3 activations, activations that are eaten each time you do major hardware upgrades, buy a new computer or simply reinstall windows. In my ignorance I happily wasted my 3 Mass Effect activations on trying out Windows Vista.
I saw it as a minor problem though, after all Bioware had a nice FAQ which told me I only needed to contact the EA phone support and they would sort things out. Heh, well EA doesn't currently have phone support in my country, so on July 10th I tried reaching them on the listed EA support e-mail instead thinking that would be fine aswell. 18 days later the only responce I recived was an auto-response confirming they had recived my e-mail and otherwise telling me the phone support for my country would be back up on July 1st 2008.:p
I've also made a thread about my problem on the official Mass Effect forums hoping that if EA wasn't going to help me then perhaps Bioware would. But there wasn't any help to be recived there either.
The irony is that if I had priated Mass Effect then I wouldn't ever had these problems. But it's a lesson learned for SPORE and any other future products containing the same kind of DRM.
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A long time ago when I played Asherons Call I remember there being huge world events, like the pvp God entering the world turning all the water to blood until he was killed, and once he got killed he didn't respawn and only one player recivied his loot. Of other memorable stuff there was a meteor crash which destroyed one of the excisting cities, and an invasion of shadows.
All those things had in commen was that I never personally saw any of it (except for the red water), and while I personally found it interesting to read about on webpages I'm sure a lot of people were unhappy never getting to see it. Perhaps that is why Blizzard have chosen another direction, and they're hardly the only MMO company to do this.
Interestingly Anarchy Online had similar events, and even had GM run quests for small groups of random people - and as far as I know Age of Conan doesn't. Which seems to suggest that perhaps the "living" world isn't as popular as it would have to be before Blizzard took it seriously.
As for gnomeregan, I agree it's about time the gnomes got their city back - but then again - it'd take quite a lot of work to create the capitol of the gnomes and that's deveolment time which would come out of creating new content.
Aslong as SPORE includes the same 3 activation DRM policy which Mass Effect did there is no reason to buy the product.
I purchased Mass Effect for PC, and I can blame noone other than myself for not getting into it's DRM policy but I frankly didn't think any company would ever do something like it. You see, Mass Effect (and SPORE) comes with 3 activations, activations that are eaten each time you do major hardware upgrades, buy a new computer or simply reinstall windows. In my ignorance I happily wasted my 3 Mass Effect activations on trying out Windows Vista.
I saw it as a minor problem though, after all Bioware had a nice FAQ which told me I only needed to contact the EA phone support and they would sort things out. Heh, well EA doesn't currently have phone support in my country, so on July 10th I tried reaching them on the listed EA support e-mail instead thinking that would be fine aswell. 18 days later the only responce I recived was an auto-response confirming they had recived my e-mail and otherwise telling me the phone support for my country would be back up on July 1st 2008. :p
I've also made a thread about my problem on the official Mass Effect forums hoping that if EA wasn't going to help me then perhaps Bioware would. But there wasn't any help to be recived there either.
The irony is that if I had priated Mass Effect then I wouldn't ever had these problems. But it's a lesson learned for SPORE and any other future products containing the same kind of DRM.