Gotta love PC gamers

Last exam on Tuesday: the end is near!

"Sit back and smell the [MW2 fireworks]"

Epic fail post title there but anywho. Just sitting here. Hanging. Waiting for the massive spam of MW2 hate/fanbois going crazy over the internet. This is going to be good. Let me just say something; I suck at FPS, and pretty much always have. I've always found it far too compeditive, with the good veteran players having a merry old time pwning people new to the game. (But I don't play that much!) I'll start playing FPS seriously when they develop a skill matching system that actually works. Right now I'll stick to my 15 minutes of COD2 a day for now, while sitting back and watching the marvelous MW2 fireworks. And now I have a Math exam. :D

Youtube partneship and some more AFK

Just yesterday I received this + an email from Youtube saying I was able to apply for a partnership. There are benefits with going with it such as a ridiculously small amount of money coming in, and that my videos actually legally belong to me. At the moment I am thinking of waiting until I start playing Allods, then take them up on their offer. Mum, I'm moving up in the world!

Also have my final secondary school exams over the next three weeks so I'll probably trolling your blogs for a while but not posting on mine. :D

Your thought-prevoking nerd-thought for the day

The other day a couple of friends and I were discussing gaming and, as seemingly always, WoW was brought into the conversation. These friends were the social, sporty type of people that just cannot understand us nerdy gamers and I was asked to explain what WoW was and why so many people play it. Slightly joking I said that you basically get to play a corpse, or a troll, or a cow that walks on two hoofs, and you get to run around putting on armor and dancing naked with elves, and with content like that who wouldn't want to play? But it made me think; how do you get people that are not interested in games excited about them?

-Me in a long lost draft for a post.

Photoshopping: New Signature

Haven't posted a photoshop job for a while now, so here we are. Knocked this up fairly quickly to use as my signature for the Allods Online forums.

Original:

Signature:

Microtransactions gone wrong

I was having a look at the rather depressing Runes of Magic forums the other day when I came across this thread. It is fairly substantial and quite complicated so I will try and summarize. This thread has over 12000 views, and all over one topic; a single player's weapon. To make a long story short this player has the best weapon in the game by a long, long way, and it is impossible that he should have gained the weapon without spending a lot of money at the cash shop. People have done calculations and have come up with a minimum of 300000 diamonds (3000 dias/99.99 euros while not on sale) needed to craft the weapon. Further calculations estimate that the weapon cost over 10000 euros, making the player who owns it one rich little kid, or one really sad older person.

An investigation is taking place at this moment as the GMs look into how exactly he was able to do this. This is perhaps the most extreme case I have heard of where microtransactions go wrong. One person in the thread said that he fought the player in an arena and was one-shotted for 30k dmg. To put this into perspective, a good tank has roughly 15k health. (Give or take) To me, this is unacceptable, and it highlights many players' greatest fear. In no circumstance should a player be able to one shot the best tanks in the game even after spending a fortune on the cash shop.

Unfair disadvantages abound in MMOs which allow microtransactions. Sure, most of the shops have the standard special mounts/potions/costumes/pets/teleportation or whatever, but many also have items that can give a player an advantage over others. In this extreme case it is clear that some people will do anything to be the best at a game, anything to get an advantage over the other players. It is up to the developers to ensure that this situation does not happen, as eventually it will kill the game as the PvP is pointless, and the end-game is constructed for those who either play for 70% of the day, or spend significant amounts of money in the cash shop.

Copying is the best form of flattery?

Someone on the Allods Online linked me to this video. Its quite funny to see something so flagrantly cloned, and I guess it saved the creative team coming up with a unique fight of them own. But really, who could blame them, seriously, with the price of choreographing virtual fights as high as they are these days...