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Random Bytes #3 - Delicious, Spiritual Opium
By Cameron Sorden | January 18, 2008
It’s another Friday, which means I’ve inevitably been collecting news stories I want to comment on all week. Coincidentally, I also have to run a Dungeons and Dragons session tonight for which I am totally not prepared at the moment, so it works out well that I’m not writing my usual lengthy post which requires 2-3 hours of writing, editing, and linking (that’s how much I love you all– 10-15 hours per week worth). On to the Random Bytes!
Random Byte: China calls online games “spiritual opium,” declares crackdown to curb internet addiction. I guess that the Chinese MMOG fans have either never heard of balancing their lifestyle or are just so depressed with life that it’s preferable to spend 20+ hours per day in a virtual world. The best thing about this story was that it let me make a pun about chasing the dragon and Onyxia, which pleased me. Woo!
Random Byte: You might have seen Michael’s interview with John Smedley over at Massively, but if you missed it (or skimmed it like I did), you probably didn’t catch this:
We are having ongoing discussions inside the company about making station access an all-inclusive pass. Everything that we have, you get as a customer. Station Access subscribers would get every expansion pack for every game, as well as future expansions for every game as well. For the same price now, without raising the price. We have two problems, though. One: we have third parties involved in this. LucasArts, for example, will have to buy off on this, as would others. Second is the less obvious one: Promising future stuff is the meat of the problem. We haven’t found the right way to word things yet. To be honest other priorities have gotten in the way. That’s what we want to offer people.
If the Station Access pass gave you everything that SOE has to offer, you can bet that a lot more people would be subbed to it year-round. One potential flaw I can see, though: How do you prevent a mass of subscriptions for one month every time a new expansion is released, for just long enough to get credit for the expansion? Anyway, this is definitely a step in the right direction, and props to Sony and Smed for attempting to give some value back to the consumers instead of wringing the dollars out of them like water out of a dirty rag.
Random Byte: Tobold wonders whether all alts should be allowed to start at 60 in Wrath of the Lich King, provided you meet some basic requirement like having at least one capped character or doing a lengthy quest. Death Knights are going to be allowed to do just that, so why not? I have two, conflicting opinions here. On one hand, I want to give an emphatic “yes!” I’d love to be able to start a hunter, warlock, or rogue at 60, since those are all the classes that I haven’t played to high levels yet– which I have for every other class. Having to do all of that content for a 5th or 6th time sucks royally. On the other hand, the middle level and low level zones are already ghost towns. Do we really need a “skip to 60″ button with the recent XP changes? My fiancee and I spent two hours in Hillsbrad last night on our alts and gained two levels. It’s crazy easy to go from 20-60 now.
Random Byte: There is a limit to how much money one character can have in WoW, and it’s 214,748 gold. How did this wealthy fellow achieve such epic piles of shiny gold? Playing the game like an economy sim, of course. I’ll vouch for that method. My merchant character broke 1000g yesterday, after I spent about 700g twinking my level 20 hunter and my fiancee’s level 20 paladin. For PvE, no less. Play the auction house, kids. It’s worth your time. You really will be rolling in gold, and you never have to pay those dirty farmers a cent.
Random Byte: I got the chance last night to spend some time with the Fallout 2 Restoration Project (which has a new update out)Â and I can tell you from personal experience that it’s quite cool. I have noticed some weird slowdown from time to time, but otherwise it’s running very smoothly. The additions are awesome and really breathe new life into what was an already great game… I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you’ve never played the Fallout games, you can’t consider yourself a true RPG fan. Go buy them and check ‘em out today.
Topics: World of Warcraft, fallout, mmorpg, politics, random, rpg, scandal |