What a Great Idea!

Even though my current “main game” of sorts is World of Warcraft (again), I’ve always been a Sony fanboy. Whether it be their consoles or their MMOs, I’ve always at least given them a shot. Most of the time, I have not been let down.

Earlier today there was an announcement put out about a new way to get your hands on SOEs MMOs. Steam. Yep, you heard (read) me write! Sony’s main MMOs are now available for download on Steam. Why do I care? Steam reaches over 15 million people. These 15 million people now all have a ton of MMOs more readily available to them, including Everquest. If it wasn’t for EQ, I wouldn’t even have this blog. It’s what brought me into the world of MMOs, and for that, I will be forever greatful.

So my props and kudos to SOE, for taking a step in the right direction, where marketing and distribution are concerned. Wish them the best of luck in this endeavor, and truly hope that this will actually cause a spike in subscription numbers for EQ, EQII, Vanguard, and any others that are now on Steam.

As a side note: For those that don’t know, I spend a lot of time as an Admin on NotAddicted.com and have recently started hosting the site’s PodCast. Be sure to check out Not-A-Cast, and NotAddicted, when you get a chance. I keep it fairly short…for now. Also, I’m scheduled to be on an upcoming No Prisoners, No Mercy Podcast as well. Stay tuned!

The Macbook Wheel!

The Onion strikes again. Check it out!

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/92328

Again, I Stand Amazed

Well, it’s a new year and one of my Resolutions is to try and keep up on writing on a normal basis, either here on my blog, or working on a book idea I’ve had milling around in my head for years.

But to hold everyone over until my next post, check out the video that WanderingGoblin had posted today…just… insane…

How in the Hell….

I’ve always been a sucker for news articles that bring out the overall stupidity of parts of humanity. Out of everything I’ve read recently, this one takes the cake!

There are a whole lot of people out there who have been bent over and …you get the point… on a RMT (Real Money Trading) scam, me being one of them. Mine was a problem with IGE and they eventually gave me my money back. That was also the last time I’ve ever tried to dig into the Gold Selling world. Luckily for me, I got my money back through PayPal. Our Danish friend in the massively article was not so lucky.

If you don’t feel like reading about this ignoramous, I will sum it up here for you:

Dumbass (Danish douch…err…dude…) decides he wants to buy ISK (Inter Stellar Kredits) in EVE with real life money.

Dumbass sees channel spam for an ISK seller.

Dumbass proceeds to the listed website.

Website owners smell blood and say “Give us $19,000 and we’ll give you ISK” (Did I mention ISK is IN GAME MONEY ONLY?! IT HAS NO VALUE IN THE REAL WORLD!!!!!)

Dumbass avoids all possible warning signs and, yes, the #@*$&#&#* hands over $19,000 in Danish currency through PayPal. (…)(words and symbols just aren’t enough)

Dumbass waits a bit and never receives currency.

Dumbass tries to sue said company, and loses. Case closed.

The stupidity of people amazes me. This man throws down half of my annual salary for fake money, and loses it! Would the amount of $19,000 set of some kind of warning bells somewhere? Seriously? SERIOUSLY? What the hell was he thinking?! OF COURSE IT WAS A SCAM! That’s just as bad, IF NOT WORSE, than falling for one of the godforsaken “You’ve Won the UK Lottery, but please give me your bank account so I can “wire” you the money from Africa” e-mails.

I’ve got an idea! If you’ve got $19,000 just burning a hole in your pocket, send it to me. That’s right, me. I can’t promise you any in game money or any kind of real life return of any sort. But if you’re willing to just take a risk on buying “Monopoly Money” of sorts, I can promise I’ll use the money to pay off my student loans, at least you would know that it wasn’t going to line some random scammers pocket!

All joking aside, What The F…!

And yes, I’m making a resolution to keep this blog as clean as possible from now on, and it was really @#$&@&# hard after reading that article!

DUMBASS!!!!!!

*grumbles and smacks forehead*

World Superhero Registry?

W…T…F…

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone! Have a fun and safe Holiday Weekend!

It’s That Time Again

I went to check my e-mail tonight and found this nifty little message there:

Important Information Regarding Your EverQuest^® Account

New Worlds of Adventure

On January 21, 2009, EQ will be consolidating “The Combine” server and “Druzzil Ro (Tarew Marr)” server into one server to be titled “Druzzil Ro (Tarew Marr, Combine).” The merge will begin at 3 a.m. PST and will last approximately five hours.

In addition, in conjunction with the upcoming EQ 10th Anniversary celebration, SOE is expecting to add a new EQ server in March 2009 and players will be able to vote on a new server type. To provide your input on the type of server you’d like, visit EQplayers.com in January.

We hope that these changes will provide players with an even more enjoyable EQ experience.

It seems it would be that time again. Everquests servers aren’t quite as popular as they once were, even less so since the last merger. I’ve barely touched Everquest in the past year, but one fo the main reasons I left is that when my core group wasn’t on, I could spend hours, and I mean hours, just sitting in the Guild Hall with LFG up. I think Sony really needs to look just beyond these two servers and start across the board mergers. It would definitely pick up morale.

Who knows though, maybe they already have it planned. I remember Everquest back in its’ hayday where you would find no less than 350-400 players congregated in the Plane of Knowledge at any given time, day or night. It would seem we will never see those times again. How unfortunate for the game that truly started it all.

If Bush Played WoW

If Bush Played WoW

I don’t know where it’s from, but one of my WoW guildies posted it on our boards today, and I had to share.

Holiday Happenings

It seems that the Holiday Fever has taken over all of our favorite MMOs.

Sony has a list for all of their games posted here.

WoW has Winter’s Veil, as well as WAR and their drunken games. What have you thought of it all so far? Post your thoughts and comments here! I’ll be posting mine as the week goes on.

A Step in the Right Direction

As most of you who read my blog already know, I like to keep up to date on MMO News and Happenings. Well, an interesting story hit the blogosphere over the past day or two that really got me thinking. If Cyan can do it, why not other companies.

If you don’t like to click links and wonder what the hell I’m talking about, Cyan Worlds, who own the Myst IP, have completely open-sourced Myst Online. Now, I’ve never played Myst Online, but I have played the entire Myst series of games, and loved every mind-wrenching minute of them.  But I’m more concerned with the possibilites of what this information and source code may have on the MMO World.

Since Cyan Worlds is willing to open source their project, maybe other companies will follow suit. And while Myst Online is a dying game, of sorts, it has a very dedicated fanbase which is what is keeping their one remaining server alive. With users now able to make content for the game, I can definitely see a spike in their server population coming soon, as well as a whole bunch of user run servers.

Open sourcing has always been a touchy subject amongst developers. This is mostly due to the fact that once a source code is widely available, it doesn’t take long for someone looking to make a buck for someone else’s work comes along. This was a major pitfall in the MQ2 community. MQ2 (which I’ll go into more detail in another post about what it is and how I know about it) source code was being stolen left and right at one point and people were selling the work of others for $300-$400 a pop, and more, making hundreds of thousands of dollars from not doing a single bit of their own work.

Who knows what will happen with this information,  I hope it turns out for the better, and that other companies can follow suit and really help start a new era of MMOs.