The Ghost of a Game

One of the great oddities of MMO’s that we are perhaps only just now experiencing is this – what happens when an MMO dies?

SOE created a Matrix Online scrapbook of sorts in memoriarium.

The Shadowbane site is gone it seems, but the Wiki lives on, preserving the lore and information of the world.  (What a grand PnP RPG setting that would make!)

But one game I’ve come across several times now, and only just realized this week that it was dead.  Kaput.  Belly Up, Servers Down.

Dark and Light.

I don’t know much about the game other than what I have been able to glean from Wikipedia and some random news archives, but basically the game suffered from poor developer communication and in house business partner fighting, and was thus dead before it was really ever unveiled.

Of course, other games have suffered like this and yet still continue to stumble onwards.

Hello? Oh God, where is everyone? Everyone's lost but me...

But what is amazing about Dark and Light’s site is that there is no announcement, news release, or indication that the game is completely and totally dead.  You could navigate the site, read all about it, even download the client, only to find that it would repeatedly fail to connect.  And then you might check the forums and poke around a bit and then notice that its actually…you know, dead.

Apparently you can still play around solo in the demo world, but the game is so buggy even that might not happen.  I’m tempted to do it anyway though.  God knows why.  I mean, I like exploring, but that would be sick and twisted right.  To download a dead game’s client just to ride around in the dead world solo.  Alone.   Nobody in their right mind would do that right?  Right?

…I need some kind of an intervention don’t I?

Congratulations – And A Change

First off, high congratulations and praise for the 19 blogs that were selected to be a part of the blog pack.  I applaud CK for expanding the count to 40 to incorporate as many of the new blogs as possible!

That said, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed.  There were 39 blogs submitted, which means just about half of the blogs submitted were admitted.  These days I blog almost exclusively about EVE, and if I can’t keep the quality of the blog above the 50th percentile – well, that’s a problem.

I’ve been powering ahead nonstop in EVE, especially with starting our own corp and I’ve been blogging about four times a week about my experiences.  And I’m feeling what may be the front edges of burnout.  I say that because I have a free weekend – not alot of work, wife and kids out of town – and I’ve spent less time than I expected playing EVE.  I have a hunch I need to throttle back from my current pace.

Given that, I’ve decided to make some changes.  First off, for the month of September, there will be only two posts a week – on Tuesdays and Fridays.  Maybe if I slow the quantity, I can improve the quality.  Secondly, only one of these two posts will be about EVE.

I’v been holding onto my birthday money, and I think its time to branch out and split my time some.  I haven’t decided which yet.  Originally I was going to do a Station Pass, as I enjoy the variety, and it would allow me to continue Pirates of the Burning Sea with my brother – but he has since stopped playing to concentrate on school, and so I may just par down to a single game.  Maybe EQ to finally experience that epic server, maybe EQ2, which really offers the complete package, maybe something else.  Suggestions (and a regular group or guild home) are welcome.

Hope you are having a great Labor Day weekend.  So far I’ve spent most of my free time watching old sci fi movies!  H G Wells anyone?

One Year and Counting!

Yay!  Today marks the one year anniversary of this blog, and I couldn’t be more thrilled!  Part of me can’t actually believe that I made it a full year.  So today, a retrospective…

Quick Stats:

101 Posts, 153 Comments

Total Views – 3,055 (Best Month: July 2009 – 1000 views!)

Busiest Day – 100 (Thursday May 21, 2009)

Top 5 Posts – Carrier Strike Force, A New Breed of CSM, Blog Banter #9, Order in All Its Glory, Wizard 102

Worst Posts – a 10 way tie, including 5 posts of posting schedule updates.  All of these had 1 page view each…

Most Prolific Search Term – Banhammer and its varients ~ 260 times

Most Active Commenter – Ysharros ~ 26 times

Quick Thoughts:

The blog took off in May, thanks to the combined efforts of some heavy hitters.  Thanks again to The Ancient Gaming Noob, Kirith Kodachi, and Ysharros for their intentional efforts to boost traffic for me!  The direct link to Carrier Strike Force by TAGN (and also picked up by Virgin Worlds) just about blew up my site.  My only regret was that if I had known in advance, I would have tried alot harder to write a better post!  The surprising second place though, was a post I wrote off the cuff – A New Breed of CSM, wherein I endorsed CSM’s coming down hard on forum trolls.  Does that mean people agree with me?

The biggest disappointment in page views, for me, was Five Things Your Guild Should Be Doing, which I think is a must read for any guild leader.  So if you go back and read one post you missed from this year, let that be the one!  My other disappointment was that no one even bothered asking me what Queasy Tom Snot meant.  Hint – anagram.  (-:

 

Goals for the Coming Year:

1) Though I’m not sure why this would stand out above anything else, it would tickle me pink to be on the West Karana daily blogroll at some point.  I just love the quick fire nature and the host of links and the off the cuff comments, and seeing my blog linked there would be a joyous occasion.

2) Be a part of someone’s podcast show.  I’ve never done it, and I don’t know how to do it, but I would gladly do whatever I needed to do to learn to be a guest on somebody’s show.   Again, not so much for fame of fortune, but just because it would make my day and probably be a fantastically fun experience for me.

Games:

Best PC Game I Played This Year:  (tie) World In Conflict, Dominions 3, (Honorable Mention: Two Worlds – better than I thought it would be)

Best Console Game I Played This Year: Need For Speed Carbon (yeah, I know, I’m behind in the series…)

Best Pen and Paper RPG This Year:  (tie) Anima: Beyond Fantasy (seriously worth all $60 for the rulebook, I promise), Burning Wheel (Crane = genius)

Best Boardgame This Year:  I just got Twilight Imperium for my birthday, and though I haven’t played it yet…its gotta be the one.

MMO Subscriptions:  Eve Online (5 months), Warhammer (2 months),Age of Conan (2 months), LotRO (2 months), Station Pass (1 month), EQ 2 (Pass + 1 month), Pirates of the Burning Sea (Pass + 2 months)  – these include free months where appropriate, and months not yet complete.

 

THANK YOU!

Again, thanks to all of you who come here and read what I write!  I hope you continue coming in the next year, and I hope I can provide you with even more entertainment and a growing skill in this thing we call blogging!

A Weekend Without Games

Makes one board and dull for the coming week.  I did get some play time, mostly last night, mostly in the world of EVE, but…what should have been chock full of gaming was instead just trying to keep up with things.  With the kids back in school last week, they were exhausted, and thus by extension whiny, which in turn exhausts us.  I crashed on the couch Sunday afternoon for more than two hours.  Its rare for me to be out more than an hour if  I take a nap.

Anyway, I did spend some time this weekend loading more of my gear onto my laptop and removing all the crap that doesn’t need to be on my laptop.

And I did get in one leve l 4 mission last night in EVE now that my buddy has rigged his most recent Megathron.  Oh, and I fell in love with the Machariel.  That’s a handsome looking ship.  At the 1b ISK pricetag though, its a little out of my range.  It did prompt a small debate though, when I announced that if I had 1b ISK, I would buy one of those before I bought a carrier.  Which reminds me, whats the difference between a corp hanger and a ship maintenance bay?

Well the end result of the mission was twofold:  first, and most exciting, was that my wallet now exceeds 100m ISK, for the first time ever (yay!), and will soon be gone as I buy my first battleship.

Secondly: its time to pull the trigger and become my own person instead of riding on the coat tails of my current corp or my buddy’s minmatar standings (lol).  I need a corp that will let me do my own thing, but also allow for fun community through the chat rooms and also group events in the form of group missions or patrols.  Let me know if you have a recommendation.

Huh? Wha?

Okay, small confession.  I stayed up way too late last night playing Civ 4.  Zulu’s sacked my capital, and let’s face it, that’s not cool.  Especially since it put the rest of my empire in the toilet and set my time table back about 200 years.  Its 1900 AD and the best I can muster is grenadiers and cannons.  Not to mention right after I took the capital back these thieving Russian Knights came swooping in on the barbarian city that I had been seiging for 10 years and took it right from under my nose, all because my Great General Erwin Rommel rolled a one or some crap, because I have no idea how level 5 Axemen lose to a level 1 Archer with no defensive bonuses.   So I pillaged the hell out of the surrounding land while he was taking over.  Then I dropped a missionary in his lap and converted the town to Hinduism, the state religion of the Celts. OH SNAP!  What now you mustached communist backstabber!

…

So today I just don’t have the intellectual focus to write coherently.  But tomorrow is my day off…and a ”choose your own adventure” post dealing with a recent fleet op.

Freaking Zulu’s.

It Was My Birthday, and I’ll Blog If I Want To

It was my birthday this weekend!  So no post on Friday as I wound up to family coming in from out of town, a surprise party at home from the neighbors and a not so surprise party at work.

It was grand fun and I can’t say that I’ve gotten a bad present at all.   It’s been a tremendous year, personally, and if you must pry (we must, we must)…it was my 30th birthday.  So now I’m old.  Or not.  It’s all relative.

But what does this mean for you the reader?  Well I wanted to tell you about the gaming related presents I got, some cutting edge, and some nostalgic:

On the nostalgic side, I received a copy of Civilization IV: The Complete Edition.  And I’ll be honest, I’ve already been sucked back in.  The first Civ came out when I was in middle school, and our history/social studies teacher got a grant and got four copies installed to use as teaching aids.  He had us come down and learn it so we could teach the younger kids and lead them through games of simulated history.  It was one of my first game addictions, and I of course bought Civ II when it came out, and found it to be…disappointing somehow.  It lacked the magictouch of the first.  But IV has recaptured me completely.  I love the new features (at least new to me) and the cool factor being able to say that I’m producing Celtic Longbowmen at the moment to repel the Zulu invasion of northeast Asia.

Second was the King’s Bounty remake.  I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but it should tell you something that I still have the CGW issue that had the review of the original game in it.

Third, my blessed inlaws did some research and decided that since I play online so much, I needed a kick-butt headset to play on.  So last night when I booted up EVE Online, I slipped on my ultra cool Razer Carcharias to “command in comfort” as the article says.  They did not disappoint.

And last, but far from least, that which I have been wanting for oh so long, a new laptop.  One that could handle games requiring more than 512 ram and 32 mb video card requirements…

It purrs.  I’m not kidding, its slick.

Dell Studio XPS 16

Intel Core 2 Duo T9550 (6MB cache/2.66GHz/1066Mhz FSB)

4GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1067MHz (2 Dimms)

ATI Mobility RADEON® HD 3670 – 512MB

500GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Drive

Soundblaster X-Fi Hi Def Audio – Software Enabled

BluRay Disc Combo (DVD/CD read/write + BD read) Slot Load Drive

9-Cell Battery

Edge-to-Edge FullHD Widescreen 16.0 inch RGBLED LCD (1920×1080) W/2.0 MP Webcam

 

Can you tell how excited I am?  Add to that my saintly grandmother’s annual offering of cold hard cash with the only stipulation being that I spend it “on something fun for [my]self” and we have some good times ahead!   Your ideas and game suggestions are welcome.  Currently on the list of possible expenditures:  Station Pass, PLEX.

LOL

If you scroll across my side bar, you’ll notice the hovering note about Scott Jennings, aka Lum, a game developer and blogger:  some days I love him, and some days I hate him.  (That, by the way, makes for really good blogging/broadcasting/writing.  Wonder if I can figure out how to do it!)

But today, he just made me laugh.  Set aside for a minute your PC concerns, and indignent outrage, and everything else, and take a step back until it comes into focus.

Scott Jennings just got trolled hard by EA.  And its just about the funniest thing I’ve seen all year in the gaming industry.

I know, its a personal failing, but I love it when the person who loves to go around tweaking everyone else for fun and profit and flaunts their superiority in the process gets their own chain jerked.  Ah…its a good day.

Sending out an SOS

Alright, I’m going to have to bite the bullet and ask for some help and feedback here.

It should be Save Our Blog, but SOB has an entirely different meaning

I’ve had this blog running for nine and a half months now, with a total of 42 posts.  I average a little over a hundred page views a month, once you toss out the time I was inactive with a new baby.  If I’m lucky, I’ll get a dozen or so hits on a post.  But I also have apparent duds that may get 0-1 page views.  So far as I know, I’m not on anyone else’s blogroll.

I’ve had 32 comments in that time period, but probably a half dozen of those are my responses or pinbacks, and probably a good half of the rest are from Ysharros, bless her heart.  And that’s probably what brings me to this point.  I never expected to be at the level of Genda getting invites to SOE headquarters for game releases or The Ancient Gaming Noob with his corporate partners.  But I was hoping that my posts would generate…discussion?  Comment?  Critique?  And some have, but very very few.

Last week I changed up my style, and did series of shorter posts that were spaced a little closer together, but I ended up, either through bad choices or bad luck, getting significantly fewer pages views when I did that.  I also posted at a variety of times, trying to see if there was a better altnerative to the lunchtime postings I was making – again, no dice.

So I come to you, loyal readers, all 10 (5? 2?) of you.  What options do I have?  Is there anything else I can be doing?  What feedback cane you give, both on writing styles and general blog management?  And honestly, should I just hang up my hat?

As a final word, I do have one ace up my sleeve I could pull.  It requires me revealing some personal information, but not really at a dangerous level I don’t think.  More to the point it’s information that could be polarizing and yet be a good hook for readers.  Essentially, it would answer the question of “why should you read this blog? what makes this blog different?”  Is that what I’m lacking and need to give this place a shot in the arm?

Anyway, your feedback is appreciated always, and for you who read regularly, thank you for the time you spend here.