Has anyone here ever been to GDC in Austin? If so, what did you think of it? Do you think it has value for an indie game dev/owner to attend for these purposes?

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010, 10pm EDT

The event will take place in the three inns of the main three cities:

Rolling Stone Inn – Askagard
The Skiffing Beetle – Chemer
The Gyrosmith Inn – Troj

Crafters, bring your wares to sell!

Adventurers, bring your coin to buy!

Website for details: http://www.primordiax.com

Wiki for world lore: http://wiki.primordiax.com

Click here to play immediately: http://play.primordiax.com

Benjamin Sell has put together an incredibly set of guides for Red Dead Redemption. He has personally written a good 40+ mission guides, as well as a number of other general guides as well. If you play this game, then you definitely want to bookmark the main guide. If you don’t play the game, it is still worth checking out:

Ultimate Guide to Red Dead Redemption

And here is one that even the non-console gamers may find at least a bit interesting:

Sex and Nudity in Red Dead Redemption

The game looks pretty awesome, and I love the setting. I think the Old West is a very under utilized gaming setting. From everything I have read, Rockstar did their typical impressive job with th e game. I don’t really agree with the game having an actual ACHIEVEMENT for murdering a nun by tying her to train tracks though.

Have any readers played the game? If so, what do you think?

What was most interesting was the sheer wealth of information that is available to players about OTHER players. History of guilds joined and left, gear, last time logged on, and more. Upon reading this article, I was actually shocked and would not want this much information about my characters available to other characters.

Some of these concerns were first raised when WoW went like with the WoW Armory. Blizzard even mocked it in one of their April Fools web pages. That mocking was out of place though when you look at how the armory has evolved. With the invention of Gearscore (a user addon that creates an actual, exact, numerical score for someone’s gear) it became possible for web sites to farm Armory data and develop minimum gearscores for certain instances or content. This in turn affected player perceptions, who would then run the user add on in game (or when looking up someone’s armory data) to decide if they were willing to team with someone. It even goes further than that – arguments on official forums would often devolve into someone looking up someone else’s guild or gear and using that as evidence they were a know-nothing “n00b.” This is just scratching the surface – I am sure readers here have even more examples of such uses.

It seems to me that MMOs are making more and more information about players and characters available to other players. Does anyone else think this is a bad way to go?

After a month and a half of that, we are ready for anyone and everything to flood the gates. Some basic information about Primordiax:

• Free to play.
• No downloads. No installation. Playable in your browser.
• Virtual World that players can affect in a real and permanent way: living, breathing, evolving ecosystem, a closed and fully player controlled economy, world technology that advances directly through community and player actions and decision making.
• Crafting system as deep and feature rich as traditional RPG combat systems.
• Deep combat system with enormous tactical variety: flanking, positional attacks, combos, group combos, and more.
• Custom artwork available for your character (created by our artists).
• Extremely detailed world lore that is built upon by both players and storyline staff.
• In Character Enforced (ICE) Environment with out of character channels.
• Double blind auction system for resources that serves as the backbone of the economy.
• Detailed skill and ability systems with skill synergies, hundreds of abilities and spells, and an unlimited respec/retraining system.
• Crafting characters actually earn their experience through crafting and selling goods. Support characters earn experience through support activities (healing, buffing, picking locks, etc.) as well as combat.
• Developed by Frogdice, a company with over 15 years of experience developing online role playing games.

Visit our…

Website for details: http://www.primordiax.com

Wiki for world lore: http://wiki.primordiax.com

or…

Click here to play immediately:  http://play.primordiax.com

In fact, if Apple spent a fraction of its marketing budget on making gaming viable on the Mac, one has to wonder if that would have seized more market share.

At long last, Apple has finally canceled their grossly counter-productive “Get a Mac” ads (more well known as Mac vs. PC ads). I have often wondered how much longer Apple would continue to give Microsoft/PCs free publicity. Years ago, the PC guy became far more loveable and endearing, and the Mac guy became more of a self-important, arrogant, douche.

For many people, the piss poor gaming support is a major reason people don’t even give Macs a second glance. For perhaps the first time in two decades, a revolution in the gaming industry is threatening to break down that wall: casual/web games. We all know how popular these are becoming, and finally they are games that Mac users can play as well. Then again, maybe Jobs and his hate for Flash will strangle this baby in the crib.

Would you be more likely to buy a Mac if it ran more games? Do you think the rise of social/web games is a major opportunity for the Mac to make aggressive gains in market share? Or is it all irrelevant, because no matter what happens Apple will always be their own worst enemy due to their obsession with proprietary standards and reliance on haughty snobbery to sell products?

I can definitely see where he is going with the argument, and I agree to a great extent.

There was a time on MMOs where a guild could be formed for any manner of reasons or purposes. It could be just friends and family. It could be for roleplay or story purposes. It could be for a theme like all-orcs or all-women or who knows what. But nowadays, unless you want to completely divorce yourself from any hope of meaningful “end game” participation, your guild is hugely important.

Whether it is raiding or RvR style PvP, you are almost required to be part of a large, effective, well organized guild with stringent membership requirements and all sorts of policies (DKP or others). All too often, players are faced with a very real and uncomfortable choice between guilding with friends they actually LIKE, or guilding with people who are good enough at the game to successfully partake in the same level of content.

Guilds have become too important. They have lost their purpose and have become a burdensome barrier to fully enjoying the gameplay and content in MMOs.

As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Raiding Sucks (click the picture for an even more disturbing image)

I have written about this topic many times before. The two biggest examples are:

Raiding Provides a False, Deceptive Sense of Real Accomplishment

Fed up! Raiding sucks as a sole form of end game content.

This would be a pretty dull post if all I was doing was encouraging you to go back and read those posts (though I do feel it is worth your while, as they are pretty good, and they provoked good discussions in the past). I bring those up because I am finally starting to see some of the same points being raised by a lot more MMO bloggers than in the past. It would appear I was at the forefront of this point, and I am very gratified to see it finally getting some traction.

I will cite a couple recent blog posts by Tobold, a well known, highly regarded MMO blogger (with a significant focus on WoW): Could you still dance with Heigan?

“What wiped raids in that encounter was the back and forth “dance” you had to perform correctly to avoid the floor erruptions, moving at exactly the right point in time, and neither too short nor too far.
…
And that is exactly what I don’t like about raiding in Wrath of the Lich King. There is no real “progression” from “easier” raid dungeons to “harder” raid dungeons. It is all just the same, various different encounters for which you and your friends have to practice the moves until you all can do them without fail. Places like Naxxramas become obsolete because of the loot they give, not because of a lack of challenge.”

and I don’t think Gearscore is the culprit here:

“The second factor is the nature of Wrath of the Lich King raiding, which I already discussed last week: Whether you play your character well, and even your gear, are not good predictors for the success of a raid encounter. The real difficulty of a WotLK raid encounter is “learning the dance”, practicing a fixed set of moves requiring sub-second reaction times.”

I have been making these points for years. I am glad other people are finally seeing it as well. The reason modern WoW/EQ style raiding is not actually epic or truly fun is because it is not about playing your character well – or even developing your character well. It is about following some rote set of moves designed by uber gamers who mastered the raid in beta before it was even released. You are all just puppets on a stage, following a Youtube script your raid leader downloaded and memorized. That is not fun. That is not epic. That is boring and dull.

2) Tom and Jerry MMO from Turner Interactive. WTF? It will supposedly be released first in India. Are Tom and Jerry super popular over there or something?

3) Study on assumptions gamers make about people based on the looks of their avatar.

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