Friday, March 28th, 2008

Time	Event
11:06a	Two Point Four aka The Last Freebie "Recent changes in my Real Life have forced my Online Life to pretty much be non-existent. A full time job and full time college will do that to you, plus lots of other personal obligations, such as helping my wife study for her classes - which she passed, with flying red, white, and blue colors and became an American Citizen just yesterday - but I do miss being able to pass my days away in Warcraft. guild wars gold Especially now that we have ‘the new shiney’ of patch 2.4. This patch, which if you play WoW you know about, and have known about since December likely as not, introduced a brand new island full of quest and/or event NPC’s. I only managed to squeak out an hour of playtime in the new lands so far, including the first 5-man dungeon, and was impressed with the flavor. wow profession leveling I’m a player who enjoys some story with my mindless questing, and reading over the progression I found it to make a lot of sense. It takes the concepts of the AQ War Effort, mixes them with the sheer brilliance (at least to me) of Daily Quests, and plops them down in the eye-watering land of pink and red that is Sunwell. While I know many of the players in my guild are making plans for the unlocked heroic badge loot, I have a much more simple goal, which probably says more about where I came from than you’d expect, and that is to get that 1000 gold title. wow leveln Oh, and the illusion orb from MGT. Mmmm, illusion happiness. The zone unwinds itself as being unlocked, and will be unlocked fairly quickly, unless, and this is a hope, the unlocking works similar to WoW existing reputation system. Some realms are reporting over 85% finished with stage one (of 4 main stages and several sub stages), less than 24 hours after the servers came up. wow eu While the quests will not be lost after the phase unlocks, only changed, a major event that ends up lasting only a week seems a bit…dull. Especially when you consider that this zone will be the last major release before the next expansion, which still has no date, nor confirmed beta. I doubt anyone thinks that Blizzard has not started on it, but no beta has yet been announced. wow lvl service I’ve seen sites listing as early as a May 28, 2008 date (EBGames had this up at one point, currently showing 11/03/08), nothing official has come out, besides the statement that this would be the last major patch before WoTLK. If you haven’t been in the game recently, the 2.4 patch seems to be a good time filler for the multitudes of bored 70’s roaming the game, and will likely keep a lot of us busy for a good while. It is definitely a good pocket filler as far as cash is concerned, and in WoW, gold is worth its weight in repair bills. " . RELATED LINKS: http://wowgoldmonter.vox.com/ http://360.yahoo.com/olivercxz1104 http://blog.goo.ne.jp/teresa_2008/ http://d.hatena.ne.jp/teresa1213/#edit_in_place http://emma1215.blogspot.com/ http://jessica112.eblogs.com/index.php (Comment on this)
11:09a	Behavioral Economics in MMOs, Part 2 "If you said “both” or “neither,” then you are more likely to be acting rationally. The savings in both cases is $7. However, most people will instinctively travel to save on the pen, but not for the suit, because the percentage difference is so small in the case of the suit, while it’s so great in the case of the pen, that it overpowers rational economic thoughts. guild wars gold In either case, $7 should either be worth or not worth your time. Take a look at how you behave when playing on an alt on a server where you’ve already got an established main in WoW. When you start out, you have the usual 16 slots of bagspace, and it rapidly begins to fill up with quest items and vendor trash. How often have you stood there for a minute, trying to figure out whether to throw out the scorpid husk (3 coppers, but it stacks up to 5) or the warped staff (9 coppers), when you’ve got a character, on the same server, that can walk 30 paces out the door of the inn in Zangarmarsh and make 100 times either of those amounts by killing an animal or two. wow profession leveling And likely can do it in the time that you’ve been dithering over a couple of coppers. Players get it stuck in their head that figuring out the loot to carry on their current character matters, when it’s ultimately a means to an end, in game terms. This brings us to the idea of anchor prices: points where we get stuck on the idea of a certain item costing or being worth X because of how we think about it. In a study mentioned in the book, researchers had students take the last two digits of their social security numbers and think about whether they would be willing to pay that much in dollars for each of four items (one bottle of good wine, one bottle of okay wine, a nice keyboard and an decent but not great mouse) . In other words, if the last two digits of their social was 23, would they pay $23 for the good bottle, would they pay $23 for the okay bottle, etc. wow leveln They then auctioned off the items. Generally, people did not pay more than they said they would. However, the interesting bit is that the participants with the higher last two digits would generally pay more for the items than those with the lower digits, because they had thought about the items in relation to higher prices. For an example of this in action in MMOs, a new server recently opened up in WoW that won’t allow any transfers for 6 months. wow eu In other words, all of the characters on the server are brand new; I played on it the first night, and there were several hundred gnomes and dwarves running around the starting area. We were all very impressed when a level 12 human warrior ran by only a few hours after the server opened up. In other words, the server should have had nowhere near the inflation that established servers had, simply because no one had any money. wow lvl service However, when one went to look at the auction house, there were still people attempting to get, for example 20+ silver for stacks of linen cloth, presumably because that’s how much they could get on their home server. In other words, they had attached to 20s as the price for a stack of linen cloth. More next time, including the economic effects of naked night elves and the psychology of ninja looting. Then, on to how to fix MMOs forever! Maybe. " . RELATED LINKS: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wowgoldmaster http://www.wowgoldhunter.blogspot.com http://geocities.com/albrecht_juergen/blog.html http://jessica1122-larysworldofwarcraftstory.blogspot.com http://wowgoldhunter.wordpress.com/ http://wowgoldmonster.spaces.live.com/default.aspx (Comment on this)
11:11a	Prepare for the Zombie Apocalypse "We have blasted through malls and ghost towns full of zombies, but are you ready for the zombie apocalypse. No, seriously. guild wars gold After all the humorous books and online quizzes about survival, someone has been taking a real world approach for the past five years: Zombie Squad realizes that it is quite possible for someone to live their entire lives without encountering the undead nuisance. However, we hold fast to the belief that if you are prepared for a scenario where the walking corpses of your family and neighbors are trying to eat you alive, you will be prepared for almost anything. Have you even backed up your computer. The Red Cross has some guidance on how to prepare in case of fire, flood, or terrorist attack. wow profession leveling You have already learned the critical lesson of looking up for aliens on the ceiling. Check your smoke alarms while you are at it. The depth behind ARGs and MMO’s I poked my nose into The Lost Ring on Thursday night, and man, did I get sucked in. The Lost Ring is a very large-scale ARG designed by Jane McGonigal, one of the designers behind I Love Bees. wow leveln It’s tied in with the 2008 Olympics and they’re really making it a global event — the game characters all speak/blog/write different languages, the clues are all in Esperanto, and objects are scattered all over the world. Anyway, as I finally pulled myself out of the rabbit hole this evening, it’s occurred to me that there’s an important similarity between ARGs and MMO’s that tends to make them powerful experiences for those involved, and that is that both types of games are a lot closer to real life than other types of games. I’m not talking about sensory things, like graphics and sound (ARGs are especially good at those!). I’m talking about higher-level gameplay mechanics like relationship building and teamwork. wow eu In the case of MMO’s, you also have things like economics and sometimes ecologies. Compared to mechanics like maneuvering tactics or aiming in an FPS, these are a lot more interesting than. They involve more parts of ourselves — more of our brain, and more of our heart. And they’re usually more relevant to the rest of our lives, as well. One of Raph Koster’s claims in A Theory of Fun (wow, $150 for a copy now. wow lvl service Time for a reprint, Raph) is that fact that much of the emotional feeling of “fun” is actually our brain’s reaction to learning something. I think it’s true, and I also think there’s potential for a deeper, more meaningful sort of fun when the things we are learning reach deeper into us and have greater relevance to our overall lives. " . RELATED LINKS: http://wowgoldmonter.vox.com/ http://360.yahoo.com/olivercxz1104 http://blog.goo.ne.jp/teresa_2008/ http://d.hatena.ne.jp/teresa1213/#edit_in_place http://emma1215.blogspot.com/ http://jessica112.eblogs.com/index.php (Comment on this)

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