Posts with tag eve-online

Sometimes, you'd like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? It's not all WoW, all the time! Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all of the other MMOs around -- past, present and future.

	Five top tips for your first few days of Diablo III Most of us are hip-deep in Diablo III already, but if you're one of the holdouts waiting for a rainy day to get started with the game, you might want to store these tips somewhere precious.
	ArenaNet: Guild Wars 2 a 'reaction' to sluggish MMO design Do you believe that the MMO genre has been stuck in a rut over the past few years? So does Christopher Lye, the global brand director for ArenaNet, who publicly denounced the post-World of Warcraft trend in the industry as stagnant.
	DCUO's Last Laugh features Hamill as the Joker Sony Online Entertainment is bringing out the big guns for its next DC Universe Online content patch. The Joker is set to return for The Last Laugh, and fortunately for everyone, his voiceover duties will be handled by none other than Mark Hamill.
	EVE talks smack about Diablo III's login woes EVE Online is letting the trash-talk fly at the newly launched Diablo III by displaying the message "37...3007...315300." It's code for "Play EVE. Servers are up, login is fine" on the game's login screen. This, of course, is making reference to the myriad error codes that Diablo III players experienced over the course of the game's launch.
	Massively's week in review Don't let WoW Insider do all of the talking when it comes to Massively's best content of the week. The Massively staff themselves have picked out what they think is the best content their site has to offer in their own weekly roundup.

Sometimes you'd like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? It's not all WoW, all the time! Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all of the other MMOs around -- past, present and future.

	Biggest EVE Online scam ever recorded nets over a trillion ISK Of all the stories that come out of EVE Online's colossal sandbox, it's the tales of criminality and dirty dealings that grab our attention the most. Thefts and scams would be cause for account closure in most MMOs, but they form a legitimate and dark part of the EVE universe. The latest scam, a simple Ponzi scheme, managed to net the equivalent of $51,677.50 in EVE's virtual currency.
	LEGO Universe goes F2P Free-to-play conversions have been in the news a lot lately, with games as diverse as Age of Conan and Champions Online throwing open their doors with various flavors of free access. LEGO Universe is the latest freemium convert, and yesterday was the official kickoff for the brick-building MMORPG's new membership tier.
	Nintendo patents "massively single-player" term According to an article at Gamespot, the 121-year-old Japanese console company has patented the term "massively single-player" to define a new genre of games that it hopes to create. The basic idea is that you would play a single-player game, and (through an internet connection) what you do in that game would influence the environment or economy of the same game on someone else's console.
	The latest in MOBA news Not So Massively is your weekly guide to the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) genre and other significant non-MMO multiplayer games. This week, League of Legends reveals more about new game mode Dominion, DotA 2's million-dollar tournament takes place at Gamescom, and more.
	Massively Speaking Episode 160 Massively Speaking, Massively's MMO podcast, arrives this week as Shawn and Rubi are joined by Beau Hindman to discuss the week's MMO news. Topics include Guild Wars 2's Sylvari Week, documentary The Raid's world premiere, North Korea's gold farming budget, and more.
	Massively's week in review Don't let WoW Insider do all of the talking when it comes to Massively's best content of the week. The Massively staff themselves have picked out what they think is the best content their site has to offer, in their own weekly roundup.

With the huge success of the free-to-play model in the United States and Europe, a feat which many said was not going to go over too well outside of the Asian markets, paying for your game over time instead of up front has become a staple, an afterthought, to gamers.

World of Warcraft isn't going true free-to-play any time soon, of course. The subscription model works for WoW in a fairly unique way. The number of global subscriptions for WoW make up such a huge, defined income that removing that income from the table in favor of the "5-percenters," the people who presumably pay for items in-game, would be almost criminal in terms of corporate mismanagement -- unless, of course, you could make more money on those 5-percenters than you do on 11.4 million monthly subscriptions, which seems like a hefty move to make.

Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play?

Not unlike most topics featured here on The Lawbringer, this one started with a blog post and a subsequent link to said blog post. CCP, the creators of MMO darling EVE Online, recently announced that players and customers could charge for third-party applications, utilities, and websites as long as the creator purchased a license. This is a fairly unprecedented move. CCP is probably the only company who could get away with this right now, but more on that later.

This story got my mind spinning about what this means for data feeds all over the MMO world, how Blizzard's free APIs coming out soon will change the way people make apps and utilities for WoW, and some thoughts on for-pay addons.

MMOs have spawned an impressive gray market of features, apps, utilities, and services that exist only because players are willing to partake in them. From Eve Online ship "fitting" apps to gold selling, the gray market lives alongside virtual worlds, and it is fascinating to think that these industries only exist because of the success of the genre. Recently, Blizzard previewed its own APIs that it would be releasing for web developers and app creators, providing easy-to-parse information to these development communities. This stuff isn't free, of course, which is interesting amidst the news that CCP would be charging a license fee for for-pay versions of utilities that make use of its APIs.

Sometimes you'd like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? It's not all WoW, all the time! Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all of the other MMOs around -- past, present and future.

	Massively's E3 Coverage E3 wrapped at the end of last week, and the MMO news that came out of the convention was substantial. Make sure you didn't miss any major highlights from any of the up-and-coming MMOs in the industry. Check out Massively's extensive coverage of the event!
	Hands-on impressions of Star Wars: The Old Republic Members of the Massively staff and WoW Insider's very own Editor-in-Chief Dan O'Halloran had an opportunity to play The Old Republic at E3. Did they like it? Did they hate it? Find out!
	DUST 514's realtime integration with EVE Online At E3, EVE Online developer CCP Games made an appearance to announce that the company's upcoming MMOFPS DUST 514 will be exclusive to the PlayStation 3. The ambitious title aims to link the world of ground troops fighting over planets to EVE Online's universe of spaceborne conflict. EVE players will be able to hire DUST mercenaries as part of an ongoing territorial war. Head over to Massively for the full details.
	Trion Worlds takes players on a tour of RIFT's upcoming Hammerknell raid Trion Worlds, the developer behind the polarizing MMO RIFT, recently gave fans a hands-on tour of their upcoming raid zone, Hammerknell. It's an abandoned dwarven stronghold which has jailed one of the great dragons for ... well, a really long time!
	Massively Speaking episode 152 Massively Speaking, Massively's MMO podcast, returns this week to wrap up E3 2011 by recording another unedited show just for you. The Massively team discusses RIFT's patch 1.3, Cryptic's Neverwinter and Rubi's impressions of SWTOR.
	Massively's week in review Don't let WoW Insider do all of the talking when it comes to Massively's best content of the week. The Massively staff themselves have picked out what they think is the best content their site has to offer in their own weekly roundup.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

I made an "oops" and missed out on this past weekend's edition of WRUP, so what better place is there to blather on about what I did this past weekend than The Queue? There is none, so here I go! I decided to check out EVE Online this past weekend and I was utterly shocked at how many other WoW players there were in the rookie areas of the game. Heck, they even had names like TheAshbringer and Kaelthas Starstrider. I'm really curious whether the overwhelming number of former WoW players is normal for EVE or if it's a recent thing. It's always interesting to see just how many WoW players there are in other MMOs.

Now with that out of the way, on with the show!

TAD asked:

"Have the level 20-60 quests in the newly-revamped Old World been updated with the newer mechanics brought in with BC and WotLK? Bombing missions, vehicles, etc. I know there's some of that in the new starting zones, but I wonder if it's been extended to the rest of the game up to Outland."

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

We've all been there before -- that magical moment when we let go of our loyalties to the object of our affection and simply give in to those inner desires for something new and exciting. Before we know it, we have turned away from our first love, leaving it huddled up in the corner feeling dirty and unwanted. Even if we don't personally engage in this abandonment, we are always anticipating the next story of someone else's doing it and the nitty-gritty details that come out. No, I'm not pulling headlines off the latest celebrity gossip columns again; I'm talking about your loyalties to WoW!

From old crushes like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies to newer flames such as Star Trek Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online, we all have games whose siren songs draw us into their grasp, away from our beloved WoW. With plenty of new and exciting MMOs on the horizon (we're looking at you, The Old Republic), now is the perfect time to start experimenting with a polygamous online gaming habit. While the frozen shores of Northrend have been nice, a trip into the Mines of Moria in Lord of the Rings Online may be the perfect thing to liven things up a bit and get that passion for your first love back.

Researchers are apparently using economies in virtual worlds like Everquest, EVE Online, and of course our own World of Warcraft to determine how real-world economies work, according to this article by Reuters. Scientists have, of course, used WoW to model real-world behavior before, but that was specifically for something biological, and thus there were quite a few differences between the virtual model and the real application. In economies, however, it's all just money and numbers, so researchers can easily see real patterns and movements in the data.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't go too deeply into their results (and it only talks about their findings from Everquest), but there is one nugget of conclusion: the economists saw inflation spike in one server over 50% in just five months. They say that the population rose on the server, which apparently made some items hard to find, thus raising prices. Economists say they've seen that same thing in the real world before: in developing nations, and in war zones. We can probably see similar effects right around a patch, or even just on weekends. As more people run to the AH to buy certain items, inscriptions or enchants, the price on those is going to rise. Interesting stuff -- it would be cool to hear what other similarities these guys have found between the virtual world and the real.

Blizzard is notorious for not announcing release dates or patch days until the very last minute -- if at all. Sites like WoW.com and MMO-Champion have had to develop relationships with people in the know in order to have any idea when a patch is coming out, and even then we usually don't find out for sure until about 12 hours before a patch makes it onto the live servers.

Not all MMORPG companies are so secretive however.

CCP, which runs the hard core space based MMO EVE Online recently had to push back an announced patch -- from Wednesday to Thursday.

What happened when they did this? Fans rejoiced that a bug was being fixed. They cheered because you finally could shoot stuff that was 0 meters away with turrets.

Now in Blizzard's world, at least the one they display to everyone outside of their organization, pushing back an announced patch would be the end of world. Cats and dogs would live together, and fire with the occasional brimstone would rain down upon the Earth. They have said many times that the reason they don't want to announce patch dates is because if they don't hit their target, they are going to upset the fans.

David Perry is one of those game developers who doesn't do anything small -- he started out with a company called Shiny Entertainment, responsible for great old games like Earthworm Jim, MDK, Messiah, and the Enter the Matrix movie tie-in game, and nowadays he's moved on to the MMO market, where he's developed all kinds of crazy ideas (including, we're not kidding, a dance MMO). This is the kind of guy who has ideas and chases them down.

His latest idea is a system called Gaikai, a "game streaming service" that allows players to jump right into any PC games they'd like, no installation or hard drive space necessary, online. There are a number of services like this springing up lately, including the much-discussed OnLive, where instead of depending on your local hardware to render and produce the game you're playing, you just send and recieve information with a remote server. As you can see above, Gaikai is focusing on PC games, and anyone who's planning on running a PC gaming service has to include World of Warcraft. Starting at about 6:00 into the video above, he shows off a version of WoW that requires no installation or loading at all; just sign in and play.

Sometimes you'd like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all MMOs, including WoW! Check out this roundup of the latest news from the wider MMO world.

	Champions Online Press NDA lifts: See our impressions This last weekend, press had the opportunity to spend my time within the Champions Online beta. After playing more than I would safely recommend, I bring you my personal takeaway in an effort to get out as much crunchy information goodness on the upcoming MMO as possible.
	Five free to play MMOs that are ahead of the class Times are tough, the wallet is tight, and you still need a game to play. But what free games can you wrap your hands around that just don't suck, right? That seems to be the trouble with free to play games -- many selections all with very low quality. But the market is not as bad as you might think. There are certainly some gems out there in the free to play market, just waiting for you to wrap your hands around them and play. Finding them however, hasn't always been easy, until now.
	Massively's post-launch interview with Free Realms Free Realms has launched, the floodgates have been opened and the servers have multiplied like little fluffy bunnies. Despite a slight delay, the launch's feedback has been predominantly positive. Not only is this rare for an MMO launch these days, considering the factors, but it's also a testament to the team involved.

Sometimes you'd like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all MMOs, including WoW! Check out this roundup of the latest news from the wider MMO world.

	Face-capturing tech to be "in-game soon" for Age of Conan Lopping off heads in Age of Conan might soon be taken very personally, as ShackNews has reported that some fancy face-importing technology is being prepared for use in-game -- you're bound to be just a tad more put out when you see your actual face rolling away on a decapitated noggin. The technology itself comes from a company called Big Stage Entertainment, and you can already get a feel for how it works at their website by registering an account and creating your own 3D "@ctor".
	SOE storms the internet with Free Realms beta promotions This weekend saw one of the largest beta key giveaways in MMO history with tens of thousands of special codes being handed out at once by several different outlets. Aside from the normal MMO news and fan sites, the Free Realms Twitter account has been giving away a thousand keys at a time.
	A rocky start for Warhammer's 1.21 patch Patch day in an MMO is always hit or miss, but according to a number of sources, Mythic's 1.21 patch for Warhammer Online broke many core components of the game that still haven't been fixed several days later. A public acknowledgment appeared on the WAR Herald this past weekend, but some players are still furious.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

To the last, I will grapple with thee...

From Hell's heart, I stab at thee!

For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee!

Iceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Stooooooone!

Dyluck asked...

"I was wondering, do the EULA and TOS really change each patch?"

Our friend The WoW Economist started a little project the other day: he added up, according to the top items lists, all of the products sold from Northrend across the servers, and then multiplied each by what he calls a "median" price (though exactly how that's reached, we're not sure), and landed on a huge amount of gold: 719,918,239.7. Obviously I'm not a WoW Economist (I'm not even that good at math), but that sounds to me like Northrend's gross domestic product: players are creating an economy of 719 million gold in Northrend from week to week.

Unfortunately, that number alone doesn't tell us much, except that there's a lot of gold moving around in Northrend (it would be interesting to compare this to, say, Azeroth or Outland's equivalent, though the more useful numbers would probably be Outland before the new expansion hit, when everyone was still farming and selling items from there). And it will be interesting to see this tracked in the future: the real GDP is usually used as an indicator of both standard of living and a country's economic health, and while there are drawbacks to using that number to gauge both of those qualities, it's probably fair to say the economy in Northrend is booming. Maybe tracking this in the future will let us see how new content patches or item or even class updates can affect what the economy does there.

Very interesting. EVE Online's creators, CCP, have actually hired an economist to help run their ingame economy, and while WoW's isn't generally seen as quite that complicated, there are still plenty of big numbers to play around with..

Who's Denis Dyack? He's the outspoken president of Silicon Knights, a company that just finished many years (almost 10, some say) of making a game called Too Human that disappointed widely. And that, of course, qualifies him to be an expert in MMO design, right?

Maybe not, but he's going to call out WoW anyway. In an interview with Videogaming 24/7, he claims that while he enjoyed World of Warcraft, EVE Online was for him personally the better game. He claims EVE has more depth than WoW, and is "a lot harder core." And he says that both games made him force himself to stop playing -- apparently they both just took too much time to play.

We've played both as well, and EVE certainly is a very deep and complex game (almost too complex for many players' tastes, we'd guess). But we'll leave the question of which game is actually better up to you. We will, however, point out that while lots of people have opinions about which games are best, not all of them are developers. If you have strong opinions about which games to play and not to play, shouldn't you be making even better games than the ones you don't like?

[via Massively]