The Funeral of WoW Gold

The World of Warcraft ( Currency: wow gold )is one of the most popular PC games today. Does the latest expansion improve on what it does well already? 411’s Derek Robbins takes a dive in and gives his take on it.

Compared to consoles, PC gaming today gets very little love from the general public. There is one major exception to this rule though. World of Warcraft currently has over 10 million subscriptions and in the month of November, they released an expansion on their popular game entitled: “Wrath of the Lich King”. Haven’t heard of it? Well, golly, welcome to the year 2009 you time traveling miscreant! Since I assume you’re from the past or have been living the life as a hermit, allow me to describe WotLK for you. I know, I’m a charitable person.
Gameplay

It’s not surprise that WotLK plays the same as Burning Crusade. It would be plain weird for a game to just drastically shift play-styles in an expansion. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t changes made. The most obvious one is the new terrain that the game adds. Burning Crusade gave us the Outlands, an area which most of us can agree best resembled a barren wasteland (outside of Nagrand). Wrath of the Lich King gives us Northrend. Northrend is a snowy area intended for higher level characters. Essentially, if you’re buying WoW for the first time and decided to get both expansions at the same time, it’s going to take a while to get to the level necessary to explore the new terrain. So consider yourself warned.

Northrend itself is easily the most stunning area WoW has to offer. Visually speaking, each zone offers something different for you to enjoy. Also, unlike in Azeroth, there really wasn’t a zone that leapt out at me as a drag to grind through. This is a big deal to me because when I first played through World of Warcraft, I found that the 30-40 zones were almost intolerable to pass through and I really had to force myself to level if I wanted to get beyond that. There’s really no area like that here as each zone offers you something new and different to experience.

For instance, let’s take a look at the starting areas in Northrend. The Borean Tundra is a pretty no-frills zone to get you used to the environment of Northrend. The quests here are generally easier than anything else you find in Northrend, but if you’re a player who is coming back after a long sabbatical, you will find that this is a very welcome intro. Borean also contains a very easy dungeon for you to work your way through called The Nexus. This dungeon is a great introduction to the things you’ll encounter in Northrend and also is a good test for Death Knights – the new class - looking for their first “real” instance. I certainly recommend the Nexus as the first heroic instance for a fledgling 80 to run through.
The other starting area, the Howling Fjord, is quite a bit different. The Fjord is full of breath-taking scenery that at times can remind you of a ski-resort. You’ll have to take lifts to reach certain platforms and generally speaking it takes more time to get used to than the Tundra. That said, once you get the lay of the land down, you’ll probably enjoy this zone quite a lot. If you’re someone who has been playing WoW non-stop, the Fjord is my recommended destination. It’s harder, but it just feels more rewarding.

Now, listen, I’m not crazy enough to think any experienced WoW veteran hasn’t already tackled both regions. If you wanted to make a Death Knight alternate character, this is how I would recommend you do things. The Death Knight, the first hero class to be introduced into the game (so we can assume that there will be others), is a very interesting one. Even though you need to be at least level 55 to unlock the class for play, which implies that you have some experience with the game, the Death Knight plays very “new player” friendly.

Let’s say for instance that you don’t have a lot of friends who will help you with quests at every whim. You love questing alone. So what can you do? Simple: make your “toon’s” specialty unholy. You can act as a hunter in this way. It’s also, conveniently enough, a great option for Damage Per Second in most instances. So, it’s the sort of spec that one can easily convert from solo play to group PVE play and PVP play. For beginners who have no idea what they wish to do, the un-holy Death Knight is easily my class of choice.

Not everyone wants to be a damage dealer though. Actually, if they wanted to be, they’d probably choose to select a class such as Rogue or Mage or one of the more “respected” damage dealers. Luckily, the Death Knight has another specialty that you can go on, unlike those classes. The Death Knight also has the ability to tank (be the guy that absorbs the brunt of enemy attacks). I’ve never personally tanked with a Death Knight, but I’ve been in group that has a Death Knight tank and if you have a good one they are more than serviceable. Ice Death Knights seem to be the preferred tanking unit, but I would assume blood – with its healing capabilities – would be an excellent choice as well. Really, whatever the case, you’ll be in good hands. Even Un-holy Death Knights can tank thanks to the high health that plate armor and the Death Knight’s frost aura gives.
Generally speaking, that’s Death Knights for you. They are a very easy class to adapt to, and I would recommend anyone who hits 55 to try one for a short period of time at least. They are, in my opinion at least, the most fun melee class to mess around with. Who cares if people call you a “nub knight?” Anything is better than being a “ret nub”. Eh? Eh? It’s all about having fun.

Of course, fun only goes so far. You’re going to reach level 80 eventually, so you’re going to need things to do at that point. In my humble opinion, the dungeons in WotLK are…a bit simpler to undertake than the dungeons in Burning Crusade. So when you’re doing heroics at level 80, almost everything is a breeze. Maybe it was because I sucked back then, but I remember running heroics such as Sethekk and Underbog and having great difficulty. The only one that really has given me trouble to this point is
Old Kingdom, and that was just one boss that’s optional. So if you were hoping level 80 content would be more challenging, well, as far as heroics are concerned you will be a tad let-down.

The real meat and bones of 80 content though is the raid instances. I only ran through one, Naxxramus, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Yeah, there were a couple of tricky bosses, but if you know your stuff you can do it. 10-man Naxx is actually very easy, 25-man on the other hand can take a bit of work and patience. Of course, if you’ve raided before, you generally know what you’re getting to and me explaining to you that a 25-man instance is tough is going to be redundant. Trust me, there are a couple of bosses on 25-man Naxx that will drive you bonkers. This is to be expected. For people looking for tiered gear, I think you’ll be more than satisfied.

Not everyone likes the end-game PVE though. After all, it often times requires that you know a lot of people who like to do similar things. That’s not always the easiest. For those people, we have the PVP content. The arenas return from Burning Crusade with a couple of new battlefields to fight on – including one where you start next to each other – and I have to say that…a lot of them just don’t do it for me. I absolutely loathe this one where you’re fighting in a sewer and there’s water blasting all around you. It’s a pain in the ass.

There are also some new battlegrounds for you to peruse. You have Strand of the Ancients, which forces you to either raid or defend a base. Your main goal in this map is to break down different walls in order to reach the crystal at the end (offense) or, if you’re on defense, you need to prevent the other team from doing this. I enjoy that the offense gets the use of tanks, which is nice and refreshing compared to your average battleground, but as a whole I think for the time being this battleground falls flat. Most PuGs just run around and don’t know what they’re doing, and even then, the rules aren’t made blatantly obvious to me. It feels weird that, as the offense, I can destroy the crystal…but the defense (on the next turn) does the same thing and somehow wins the map? It’s just…I think some kinks could be worked out. Why don’t you just have it where the first team to successfully defend their base wins? It seems too confusing to me, but maybe I’m just attacking it wrong.

Taking a page out of the book of Warhammer Online, Wrath of the Lich King also introduces a fairly robust world PVP event in Wintergrasp. Now, we’ve had world PVP in WoW before. Remember areas in Terokkar Forest and Nagrand? The problem with those, is that it felt just like 1 v 1 PVP on a grand scale. Compared to battlegrounds where you had an actual task, it really wasn’t anything special. In Wintergrasp, things are a bit different. Here’s how it works: One team plays defense. This team, horde or alliance, is the one that won the game before. They want to keep Wintergrasp in their possession. The other team, the offense, is the opposing alliance. This plays a lot like Strand of the Ancients with the usage of vehicles and destruction of things, but I also felt it threw in some Arathi Basin with the seizure of areas. I found that I like Wintergrasp a lot more than Strand of the Ancients because it was one-shot. Either the offense wins or the defense wins. Right now, on my server at least, it seemed like the offense always won. I assume as people get more used to it, that will change. Still though, I want to see more PVP areas like Wintergrasp added in future patches. It will be awesome.

The expansion seems to add a fairly decent amount and is certainly worth plunging yourself back into WoW addiction to enjoy. Sure, things may be a bit easier than they were back in the old days, but they offer enough new things for you to do that I really can’t tell ya’ to stay away. For those people pondering coming into WoW now that the newest expansion is out, take heart in knowing that leveling is much faster. They WANT people to experience that new content. It’ll get a little jarring when you get to Northrend and see your experience progress deflate, but hey! Getting there is half the battle.
Graphics

It seems like Blizzard upped the graphics a little this go around. Don’t mistake me for a second, the game is hardly visually stimulating, but with each iteration it gets much more enjoyable to look at. This time, character models seemed to be much more detailed and there were also shadows on the ground that seemed, well, accurate to how they should be. Perhaps I am peculiar, but I think that it’s really cool to be able to watch your character ride along and see his shadow go along with him perfectly.

Now, with that said, there are still issues. There is no collision detection in the game at all, which you know, is obvious if you’ve ever played. Also, compared to current PC games, it’s not exactly a looker. You’re not going to be walking away from WoW and talking about the graphics, I’ll say that. It’s not ugly by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s simplistic. I guess that’s the point though. It’s supposed to appeal to a large number of people, and a large number don’t have the technology to play WoW on anything high tech. The low system requirements have been a Blizzard thing though. Remember Starcraft? I guess it’s all for a point.

So, yeah, simplistic. Not bad, not good, just simplistic.
Audio

The game sounds alright. I mean, look, if you’ve played WoW before you generally know what you’re getting. Still though, the sound can go a long way in improving the mood and you got to like that. With that said, after a while I just switched it off and found myself listening to iTunes as I grinded. It’s nothing against the music, it’s very serviceable…but after a while ya’ just quit caring and want to listen to what you want to listen to.

It can improve the experience, but it’s not going to rock your world by any stretch of the imagination.

Fun Factor

The thing with the World of Warcraft is that you’ll get from it what you put into it. If you put your heart and soul into the game and try to get every achievement and get every piece of loot, you’ll probably like the game a lot. Hell, if you just mess around with your friends on weekends and casually stroll through dungeons, you’ll most likely enjoy yourself. If you’re not committed, I guess it would hurt the amount of fun that you have, but it’s really, really hard not to enjoy the game at least a little.

Essentially, as long as you are decent at communicating with people you will have fun in some way. The World of Warcraft is one of those games that it’s almost impossible not to have fun in, and WotLK continues to prove that point.
Lasting Appeal

Wrath of the Lich King is a game that I probably will be playing for a long time coming. I haven’t even begun to get all of my tiered gear, I haven’t gotten a new motorcycle mount, I haven’t been to every raid dungeon, really…there’s a LOT left I’ve got to explore. I’ve played WoW lifetime for a long time, longer than I am proud to admit, longer than I ever thought I would play a game. The thing is, this game will suck you in and own your life if you let it. To say that it has lasting appeal is a bit of an understatement. I am a man who enjoys JRPGs, but I’d say I’ve invested more time in the World of Warcraft than I have every Japanese RPG in my life COMBINED. That really says something.

That’s just in part to how many things there are to do in the game. WotLK adds a lot of new content that will keep you coming back for more. It’s fun and if you have a good group of people to play with, you’ll probably be playing for a very long time to come. That’s no exaggeration.

The 411

Wrath of the Lich King is a very competent expansion that adds enough new content to keep experienced WoW players busy for months at a time. It even offers a few new things for those growing tired of the tedium that comes with grinding on a daily basis. Really, Wrath of the Lich King is a game that you can enjoy in many ways. Even though it may not over-whelm you with difficulty or astound you with originality, the game is still good and damn addictive. I don’t really follow the lore, but those I spoke with seem to enjoy it, so that’s there for you as well. Really, that’s all you need. Now, excuse me if you will…I have some arena dates to catch up on!

We got a submission today that could almost be a parody from The Onion. Except that it’s very real.

YouPlayorWepay.com, founder George Tung tells us, offers the “World’s first third party compensation for World of Warcraft“. In short: an insurance policy offering compensation when you’re unable to play the world’s most addictive online game. According to the site:

Are you a fan of World of Warcraft™ (Who Isn’t!?)
Are you sick of waiting hours upon hours in queues?
Feeling angry about unexpected outages and laggy game play?
Wish you could be compensated when you can’t play?

Welcome to the world’s first third party compensation website. YouPlayorWePay.com aims to compensate you with CASH for the problems MMORPG players know all too well: waiting queues, system outages and laggy game play. It doesn’t matter if you’re a level 10 Warlock or a level 70 Warrior. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a new realm with little population or an old realm with a high population! We aim to compensate you if you experience waiting queues, system outages or laggy game play.

While intriguing, those are the kinds of claims that drive us to investigate further. And what we found was - predictably - unappealing.

Worth The Fee?

YouPlayorWePay does not offer pricing information until after you register, at which point you learn that the payout when you fail to access WOW is 1.75 times your monthly fee. In other words, for every dollar you pay to insure your account, you’ll get 75 cents in “compensation”. For the system to work, of course, they’ll require most people to happily pay their premiums and never claim - while that works fine for expensive items like cars and houses, would you pay $20/mo to get $35 on the one occasion something goes wrong? Worse: we found no evidence on the site that YPOWP is licensed to offer what is essentially an insurance policy.

Irish developer Jolt Online Gaming has revealed plans to revive classic computer game series Zork as a browser-based massively multiplayer online game creatively dubbed Legends of Zork.

Legends of Zork, which is being published by Activision, is currently in beta with no official release date yet disclosed. Prospective players can join the beta at the game’s official website, as well as sign up for automated updates on Legends’ development status.

Zork players will recall how addictive the game was all those decades ago, so merging that classic gameplay with the innate draw of an MMO is a stroke of genius. I can’t see Legends supplanting the pillars of the genre (World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, etc), but this could very well be the next big workplace distraction, assuming it isn’t eaten by a grue.

 

The corpse of Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s Lively is barely cold and another virtual world rises to take its place. What comes, however, is almost certain to be more lively that Lively.

Metaplace, a platform for user-generated virtual worlds, is getting ready for open beta testing. The company isn’t yet ready to say when that might be, but it has offered InformationWeek 200 invitations to the closed beta test and agreed to lift the nondisclosure agreement I signed as an alpha tester so I could write this story.

To claim a closed beta invitation, visit Metaplace and enter IWEEK in the box labeled “Redeem your invite key!”

If you’re among the first 200 readers of this article to click through and sign up for a closed beta account, welcome aboard. If not, you shouldn’t have to wait too much longer before the site opens to the general public.

Metaplace is the brainchild of veteran game developer Raph Koster, once the lead designer of Ultima Online and now the company’s president. Its ancestry is immediately apparent: Many of the virtual worlds built on the Metaplace platform use the isometric perspective that was popular in games before technology advanced enough to make mass-market 3-D representation feasible.

Metaplace worlds aren’t limited to an isometric view. The prevalence of this view in user-generated worlds is a consequence not of an affinity for the past but of the limits of current browser technology and the complexity of 3-D design. Rather than requiring users to download a dedicated client more capable of advanced rendering — a design choice what would have meant fewer potential users — Koster and his company are trying to create a platform for making graphically rich interactive worlds that requires only a Web browser and Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE)’s ubiquitous Flash technology.

The isometric view “is approachable, looks 3-Dish without being 3-D, allows greater scope for people to build without being too complicated, and it will scale nicely to 3-D someday when there’s a good Web-embedded solution for 3-D rendering,” he said.

Koster said that while Metaplace does indeed anticipate a day when browsers will render 3-D graphics better, he’s satisfied with the state of the technology at present. “Of course, we’re always looking ahead,” he said. “But I would say that the browser trade-off — it’s certainly a trade-off because you don’t have the same amount of rendering fidelity that you would with a standalone 3-D engine or even a plug-in — the trade-off has been spectacular. It looks pretty good for something running in a browser, and Flash appears to be on a trajectory to do pretty well.”

While Google’s late Lively may make a convenient touchstone, Koster doesn’t see many points of comparison. “There’s common underlying technology, but I don’t really see us and them as having a lot in common,” he said. “I don’t think you can draw conclusions [from Lively's fate] about the virtual world space as a whole.”

Koster sees Metaplace more as a medium, like blogging, that enables new forms of expression rather than a product that’s easily compared to the competition. That’s a view that appears to be informed by his ambition to let anyone create his or her own virtual world.

When text-based worlds were popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, the technical barriers for virtual world creation weren’t excessive, and many people did run their own text-based multiuser dungeons, as some continue to do. But as 3-D massively multiplayer games like Everquest and World of Warcraft became the standard, it became more expensive and more complicated for individuals or small groups to create or manage virtual worlds.

But the technology necessary to make virtual worlds and serve them is becoming commoditized. Game authoring systems like Unity are allowing individuals and small teams to produce gaming content that a few years ago would have required more rarefied technical expertise.

Koster sees Metaplace as a democratizing influence that will allow anyone to express himself or herself through world design.

“For virtual worlds, the vast majority of stuff has been closed off for decades,” he said. “It has been a long time since we had the open ferment seen in text MUDs decades ago. One of the things about closed platforms is that they don’t pursue long tail very well. They tend to have a broadcasting mentality. Things like Second Life that started pushing away from that revealed that there are a lot more things that users could want to do.”

Metaplace aspires to be the platform where users can pursue those desires.

“The way we approached it is we built a powerful, capable platform,” he said. “Full scriptability, all of that stuff. And then we start pushing the capabilities to end users. We are proudly and defiantly aiming at mass market. We are not middleware. We are not a high-end tool. We are aiming at allowing ordinary people to do this.”

The results look promising, but it’s still too early to tell whether game and virtual world design works best as a populist or elitist medium.

Those who have used Metaplace’s tools effectively appear pleased with the platform so far. A beta tester who goes by the handle MonkeyKungFu put it thus in an interview posted on the Metaplace blog: “The framework provides the ability to quickly prototype game ideas, and get instant feedback from other people about what is and is not working/fun. I like to knock stuff out fast and scrap ideas that aren’t working before I spend too much time on them, so this is an ideal platform for that.”

The Metaplace forums contain thousands of posts from testers and Metaplace staff. It’s evident from the engagement of the users that there’s a lot to be excited about.

Koster is, of course, optimistic about Metaplace’s prospects as an accessible platform. “If you’ve hopped around a lot of the worlds, you’ve seen a lot of things done by programmers and things that are just meeting rooms or pretty apartments,” he said. “Those don’t take a lot of sophistication. They’re ordinary folks who have been given a tool that they never had before. There’s one world devoted to hot dogs. It’s just hot dogs imported off Google 3D Warehouse.”

In December, Metaplace added a tool to import 3-D models from Google 3D Warehouse, an online repository for 3-D models. “That has led to just an explosion of building,” said Koster. “It made bringing in an enormous quantity of high-quality art very easy.”

It’s the availability of tools like this upon which Koster’s vision depends. Programmers and other technically savvy sorts should have no problem scripting items in Metaplace or developing custom behaviors for objects. But for those who just want a stylish online chat space to call their own, just grasping the creative possibilities of such an ambitious platform could be a challenge.

Metaplace provides a strong set of tools to help would-be world designers. World generation is menu-driven and there are standalone tools for building animation strips and the tiles that carpet worlds. It’s very easy to create an appealing personal space — placing furniture, for example, involves nothing more than clicking and dragging — but coming up with a compelling game concept and implementing it is harder than one might wish, just like writing an engaging novel or short story.

At the same time, the unfettered nature of the platform shows that openness invites unexpected excellence. One world, for example, starts out like many others, with a virtual space and furniture, but it transforms into a 2-D approximation of Milton Bradley’s Connect Four. The table graphic that launches the game exists as a standalone object that can be imported into any Metaplace world.

Koster recounts how he arrived in one person’s world to hear the sound of people talking. The programmer responsible, said Koster, “had hooked up text-to-speech so that characters could use TTS voices. As you typed, people could come out as TTS voices as voice chat. I was just floored because it never occurred to me that a user would be able to come along and do something like that on his own. After he did that, he took that part and put it on the marketplace so that ordinary users can [plug it in]. That’s where the power gets really amazing. Another guy set up a world where you get to watch the same chat happening in multiple languages at once, so you start learning the languages by osmosis.”

As for the business model, Koster anticipates that the emerging market for digital goods in Metaplace worlds eventually will represent a source of income from object designers and for his company. He also says the company may offer certain premium services to world builders in the future. At present, the items in the marketplace — creatures, vehicles, natural objects, furniture, architecture, and plug-ins — are free.

Free too is most of the software upon which Metaplace is built. The company relies on the open source LAMP stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The server is written in C++ and uses Lua as an embedded scripting language. It runs on a few dozen Linux servers.

To avoid the technical challenge of running a virtual world simulation across multiple machines as Second Life does, Metaplace has been designed so that each process manages a virtual world of up to several thousand people. Koster says he’s confident the system will be able to scale to handle popular worlds with thousands of active people, but the expected use case at the moment is thousands of worlds with hundreds of people.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Metaplace’s openness is its terms-of-service agreement. Virtual worlds tend to be among the most restrictive in terms of the rights granted to their users. But Koster is breaking the mold. “We actually adopted the declaration of the rights of avatars that I did years ago,” he explains.

In plain language without the usual legalese, the terms of service spell out user rights and responsibilities in a way that conveys respect rather than the desire to restrict. So long as users obey applicable laws and respect the end-user licensing agreement, they can look forward to controlling their own intellectual property, to the right to earn and extract economic value from created worlds, and to the right to establish new rules that apply to their worlds, for instance.

It would be a mistake to see Metaplace exclusively as a game environment. The platform also has a strong social component, even at this early stage with its limited audience of testers. When the doors open, Metaplace may end up competing not with the likes of Second Life or Habbo but with Facebook. To imagine how that might happen, consider how some Metaplace testers have been streaming music into their personal worlds using programming hooks to Last.fm. Others are trying to implement music composition in their virtual spaces. Really, if data is available online, there’s probably a way to access it and present it on Metaplace. That means that worlds can duplicate many of the functions of Web sites, albeit with a different user interface.

According to the Metaplace documentation, “Every object has a URL [that can be queried] from outside, every object can post to a Web page or browse the Web.” Not only that, but Metaplace worlds can be embedded on any Web site through a Flash client using JavaScript embed code. Metaplace, thus, is likely to appear in many places, on many Web sites.

Betting on the masses, as opposed to the technically proficient, to produce compelling virtual worlds might seem like a risky decision. There are still people who can’t accept that an army of amateurs has produced something as useful as Wikipedia.

But Koster is undaunted by such concerns. “If we give people access and freedom, we’re pretty sure they’re going to surprise, shock, and astonish us with what they go do,” he said. “Honestly, it’s been happening to us on a regular basis.”

The Internal Revenue Service, the American tax authority, is looking into the possibility of taxing transactions that take place in virtual worlds, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, based on the claim that revenue generated within these environments is nearly equivalent to the GNP of Russia and significantly greater than the GNPs of many more countries.

The National Taxpayer Advocate: 2008 Annual Report to Congress, Volume One, states: “Where there is economic income, there is likely to be tax due from someone.” (p. 217)

Certainly it is true that monetary conversions from many such virtual world currencies into real-world currencies are both possible and fairly common. For example, the going rate in early 2008 for 1000 wow gold pieces was between US$12 and US$22. Second Life in particular is proving problematic for the taxman. This is because that virtual world’s terms of service allow users to generate virtual goods for which they retain copyright and to sell those virtual goods for “Linden Dollars”, which are then not uncommonly converted into real-world currencies (at a rate in early 2008 of about 266 Linden Dollars to one US dollar).

In both cases, there is real-world money being made (and perhaps not being properly reported to the IRS). In the case of Second Life, one encounters novel creations being made by people who are then given intellectual property rights over them (as part of Second Life’s terms of service)–intellectual property rights that can generate in-world and, hence, out-world income in a manner similar to, say, a published novel or piece of music.

But what about exchanges that take place entirely within virtual worlds? The National Taxpayer Advocate continues, “[I]s a person subject to tax each time he or she acquires virtual property? How about when the person exchanges one virtual property for another, or for virtual currency? [...] What, if any, information reporting, withholding, backup withholding, and recordkeeping requirements apply to these transactions

Back in the hay days when a great PC game could be bough from Todd, the young office intern, grimly copied onto a floppy disk and sold outside the toilet for five bucks, you did not exactly need a computer borrowed from NASA to play the thing. You just had to pop it in, aim for the office high score and pray the boss did not happen to walk by and see you playing Tetris or Space Invader or in the later years, Doom. Some say that games were more enjoyable then without the storyline to bog you down and the millions of other players with whom you had to interact. But, whoever says that is just plain crazy.

By Dean Sherwin

Now in the new year of 2009, we will be expecting this year’s upcoming release of PC hardware sometime around April of March after they sell last years stock during the post-Christmas sales. Millions will be running out to by components or even full PCs to take advantage of the updated systems so that they can squeeze just a little bit more graphical quality from WoW. These people may seem a little crazy but they are actually quite on the ball in gaming terms.

Whilst you do not necessarily need a top notch PC to enjoy video games, it is worth making sure you have a little bit more power than what recommended on the back of the box. This makes the game more playable when it comes to a point where you have hundreds of players all gathered in a town during online play or you’re engaged in a heated fire fight, pop up for just a second to take that perfect shot and everything freezes on your PC while the other guy fills you with lead. My point is that perhaps buying a few sticks of RAM or a new video card when your PC is around the two-year mark will give it a second burst of life. Believe me, when you pop in a stick or two of RAM you notice the difference in the old girl straight away, whether it is playing games or not. 

 

Sometimes, I really want chocolate. Sometimes, I really want peanut butter. And occasionally, I want ice cream. This problem is perfectly solved when I go eat some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups ice cream, a triage of sugary-goodness.

The same can be applied to games. Sometimes I want to shoot people online, or grief 12-year-olds on PlayStation Home, or gank phat lootz in an MMO. It’s a conflicting trifecta, I know. Could there somehow be a mash-up of these three different games?

Enter Crimecraft, a new massive multiplayer online game coming out from New Jersey-based, Eastern European developer, Vogster. Combining third-person shooting with MMORPG elements of games like World of Warcraft ( Currency: wow gold ), the aesthetic of Saint’s Row, and a sprinkling of Home (believe me, it’s there), Crimecraft is certainly a risky, but cool sounding game.

There are two parts to playing Crimecraft. First, there is the lobby area of the game, and second is the actual third-person shooter. These two elements join to form a genre that Vogster calls Persistent-World Next-gen Shooter (PWNS), and although they don’t crossover in a manner like World of Warcraft, they are intricately tied together.

Before starting off, gamers will create their own character. It is pretty standard for create-a-character, and the clothing options are initially pretty limited. However, that changes as you play, and high-level players will be rewarded with more options as they progress.

Then there are the three lobby areas, each with its own unique urban aesthetic, will be able to hold 500 people at any given time. The two areas I saw — a Times Square-like glitzy downtown, and an residential/business district based on
San Francisco — were large and clean.

Of course, I didn’t see these areas with all 500 people, but I was told that even with 100 people, these lobbies would be bustling with non-player characters and live players hanging out before the battles, which the game calls “Instances”.

One of the most important areas in the lobbies are the shops. Here is where you will buy weapon and armor, ammunition for the guns, consumables like an item that will temporarily grant you double XP, clothing, and more. The clothes are pretty neat, designed specifically for the game by New York fashion designers, and based off of real world brands.

Many of the clothes I saw were pretty standard, but non-traditional outfits and accessories are available. Vogster says they want to have fun with the game, versus the serious route. Also, special, one-time items can be gained during seasonal and special events that are being planned.

Other places in the lobby areas include crafting areas where new weapons and items can be made, auction halls to sell unwanted gear and, should you become involved in a “gang” (which is Crimecraft’s version of a clan), there will be group hideouts. There members can come together and talking strategy in perparation for upcoming Instances and events. Gang members can even work together to buy items for their hideout, like stripper poles or crafting tables.

It’s really interesting, but I think the best way to describe the lobby portion of Crimecraft is that it is Home, but with a specific purpose. Instead of aimlessly wandering around and buying clothes that have no meaning, the lobby area of Crimecraft is interesting, giving players plenty of options for things to do in prep for actual gameplay.

Hell, by the looks of things, if you just want to screw around in the lobby like some expensive Second Life or Home, Crimecraft is cool for that too. These lobby instances will contain in-game, real-life ads like Home. But should a gang make a tournament, the game will post advertisements announcing these results.

Also launching with the game is a social networking site specially built for the game. Here, people can interact outside of the game, discuss gang tactics and events. This should be pretty helpful for becoming involved in Crimecraft, as it should bring people together and limit the number of people trying to solo the game.

The actual Instances, however, play much like any other third-person shooter. Which is a good thing, considering that Vogster’s goal was to make a good third-person shooter before they make an MMO. I was shown two modes — one was a Player versus Player, three-on-three, gang-versus-gang deathmatch. This took place in an industrial site. As far as PvP is concerned, there can be a total of 16 players, which is a explicit decision on Vogster’s part.

The second mode I saw, a PvE, was a defense mode in a construction site. Here, players worked together to protect an object from wave after wave of bots. This mode is great, as it allows players to shoot lot’s of screaming fools as well as collecting loads of loot. It’s rather fast and hectic. It’s so fast and hectic that Vogster removed the cover system they had placed in the game; it was just too slow. In both areas, the sizes were just right, and eight more areas are planned for the game’s Q2 launch.

As gamers play, they will be pulling loot from their downed opponents. Like any MMO, this can be anything from armor to guns to crafting material. Rare materials and weapons will also be found this way, so there is certainly an initiative to collect the best stuff. Especially when the best stuff includes diamond-encrusted guns.

Like any MMO, players will also be leveling up. However, since third-person shooters are skill based, low-level players can still make kills against higher-level opponents. To create distinction, higher-level players will have access to different abilities, such as invisibility or scopes, for example, which will give them an advantage over n00bs. Higher-level players will also have access to different weapons and special instances against better PvE bots. These better opponents will give better experience and items, creating distinction between newer and older players.

Vogster had originally announced Crimecraft as a free to play game, while offering gamers the option to purchase weapons and items. Vogster is currently reevaluating this plan, and has decided to take out the option of players spending real-world money on in-game weapons that could create an unfair advantage. However, players can spend money for aesthetic changes, such as a gold plated pistol, for example, as well as consumable boost items, such as a double XP item. Ultimately, Vogster has not decided on a pay-to-play plan, a free-to-play plan, or a combination of the two.

Visually, Crimecraft looks great, and not just for an MMO. Utilizing the Unreal 3 Engine means this game looks really fantastic in action. Even small details, such as shadows from individual leaves on the trees combine to make a beautiful looking game. Unfortunately, I have concerns that the Unreal barrier might limit the number of people who are going to be able to play this game.

I know this is going to sound silly, but the fact that the lobbies feel like Home is actually pretty neat. I also loved how Vogster is open to having fun with the character creation. Nothing grinds my gears like a group of people who take themselves too seriously.

Unfortunately, there are some details that concern me. First, in Vogster’s attempt to combine the best of MMOs and third-person shooters, they could alienate both groups of gamers. Also, since this is an MMO, modding is out of the game entirely. That’s a drag, especially for an Unreal 3 Engine game. Also, the minimum specification entry point is a pretty high for gamers used to easily loading up a game like World of Warcraft. Ultimately, if Vogster makes the MMO elements and the third-person shooter elements, things should work out ok.

 

2008 was quite a year for Massively Multiplayer Online Games. The year saw another advance from the unstoppable juggernaut, new challengers that may or may not be pretenders to the throne, a flanking maneuver from Middle-Earth, and a painful death in the depths of outer space.

When charting subscription numbers for MMOs, one concrete way to judge their growth, the old adage proves true; there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Few companies divulge their numbers publicly, leaving estimates and rumors to make up the difference. For example, this Massively.com article provides some interesting insights, but does so using a small sample size.

If not for the heroic mathematical efforts of Bruce Woodcock and others, the only real indication of growth is if a company divulges that information, or the game goes belly-up. Thus, I present a more personal overview of some MMO’s to determine which ones grew and which blew in 2008.

Grew – World of Warcraft: WoW owns the market. Love it or hate it, it capped 2008 off with a fresh expansion and 11.5 million subscribers (Estimates for the next closest title, Warhammer Online, hover around 800,000). The game is the success every other fantasy MMO is compared against. This may be unfair given WoW’s presence, approachability by all ages, and low system requirements, but its growth remains undeniable.

Grew – The Lord of the Rings Online: LotRO is what it is; PvE content with greater storytelling lore than WoW. Though it won’t reach that ability to attract casual and hardcore gamers that WoW does so well, it’s got a niche and it’s growing, evidenced by the success of its recent expansion, Mines of Moria. Best of all, the game doesn’t spend three pages talking about walking.

Blew – Tabula Rasa: Ouch. Not even Lord British could deliver. This hyped Sci-Fi MMO spent ages in development, finally was released in late 2007, and is now slated to close for good in February 2009. That may be the finest definition of blowing it in 2008.

Blew – Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures: Having to consolidate servers to ensure a decent player-base mere months after release, and having masses of subscribers quit after the first months due to bugs puts this MMO firmly in the “Blew” category. However, there is hope for 2009. After dropping the ball with the player base initially, there are efforts to win the players back. If that happens, this game could be in the “Grew” category for 2009. Nonetheless, it shows that however captivating, nudity and intense violence can’t overcome early bugs and broken promises.

? – Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning: Warhammer Online is eking out its existence by providing what other titles don’t in terms of PvP. The caveat is WAR’s time on the market: in a few more months will WAR suffer the declines that Age of Conan did? Indications seem positive enough to place this in the growing category, but it’s too early to tell.

There you have it. One writer’s opinion on how some of the MMOs fared in 2008. That said, nothing can be more divisive than the players of two distinct MMOs, and your experience may vary. Have a popular MMO you enjoy that’s not on the list? Agree or disagree? Comment!

If World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold)
were a college course, would you enroll? David Friedman, an academic economist “who teaches at a law school and has never taken a course for credit in either field” hopes so. He’s laid out a few reasons why he thinks all that copper and iron and mithril and thorium mining you’ve been grinding into virtual booty might be worth an elective credit or two.
Says Friedman:
WoW has markets and prices, including an auction house with many buyers, many sellers, and a wide range of products for sale. Prices are readily observed—starting prices, buyout prices, relative prices at one time, changes over time. Actual sales prices are a bit harder, but if your students are active players they are probably buying and selling things and could be persuaded to keep track of prices paid and received and make the information available to the rest of the class.
Check that last sentence. I wonder if Friedman realizes he’s essentially just made a case for education-funded pro bono tip-sharing. “Here’s how you turn a Libram of Constituion, a Black Diamond, a Lung Juice Cocktail, and 4 Dragon’s Breath into a Lesser Arcanum of Constitution, then sell it for a mint.” Which creates a natural disincentive to purchase all those tree-slaughtering strategy guides, in turn attenuating real-world publisher strategy guide sales.
Put the corporate strategy-guide publishers out of business? Stick it to all those shameless aftermarket retail strategy guide peddlers? With (if the university’s public) taxpayer dollars? Well there you go, now you know why these guys think Friedman’s a flaming liberal!
In all seriousness, Friedman’s points are actually pretty compelling, even if guys like Edward Castranova and others have long since tilled this turf. Using popular media to convey important, nuanced concepts like “arbitrage, collusive behavior, and predatory pricing”? Sounds like a win-win to me.
Would you enroll in World of Warcraft 101?
Hey, what self-respecting gamer wouldn’t? After all, it’s a chance to legitimize all that time you’re planning to spend holed up in your dorm slaughtering Bloodfen Scytheclaws and Ragged Young Wolves and launching company-sized all-nighter raids to — err, excuse me, I meant transacting individualist socio-economic rhetoric that transgresses marginalizing objective superstructures and re-conceptualizes the spatial aesthetics of color, animation, and architecture.
Right?

I have no idea how to describe pom-poms. I guess they’re like little furry balls that you can assemble, along with the usual crafting supplies, into cute little figurines or objects. And as you might expect, since you’re reading this here on WoW Insider, someone has assembled these materials into World of Warcraft-related objects, and as usual, the results are awesome.

This time it’s Eldrian, sister of Pike over at Aspect of the Hare, and her creations are amazing. She’s a Druid, so there are all the Druid forms for both factions (there are the two moonkins above), and she’s also made a Hunter and pet, a Warlock and a Voidwalker, and even mounts and little Warsong Gulch flags. We’ve compiled a few of the best shots of the figures in the gallery below, but don’t forget to head over and check out her page to see front, side, and back shots of everything. Very awesome, and very meticulously created — one of the figures took over 10 hours to make.