Saturday, May 12, 2012

Right Side (A Gameless Weekend)

I missed SWTOR, I missed my light-sided Juggernaut, my dark-sided Jedi Shadow, and of course I also missed my  trying-to-be-neutral Commando, I agree this contradict every other 25.678 other posts about how SWTOR sucks, or Bioware sucks, or EA (really) sucks (which is true anyway since I still want my digital download, don't try to tempt me to import it, if players got to hop several loophole just to get a copy and set a subscription that's not good), oh hey check this out, they're only have 1.3 million subscribers!! I really don't care, playing on trial and reporting closed beta texturing bugs doesn't seemed enough for me but the publisher and (the latest bug reports) kinda put me off.

See these fingers? It'll go right up your behind
Also I'm on withdrawal from the last Guild Wars 2 BWE, and I also can't play The Secret World on this beta weekend (my notebook finally joined my 'must be replaced before it takes toll of your life' queue list) so I'm officially single and gameless this weekend. And since I can't put an order to a new game gear for at least a month, I think I'm returning to a normal state of a human :D

There's something I've gotta take from the last GW2 BWE, the feelings of on the same side (Kill Ten Rats have a pretty good article here), you see... partying on MMORPG kinda rough sometimes, the maximum numbers of members, the reluctant feeling when someone sent you random group invite just to kill some big bad... dragon on an unshareable quest, the amount of LF healer or LF tank/DPS or everything else in between, the keyboard facebump moment when you just one mob close into the completion of a mission and the orc that just spawned beside you got tagged by another player. In Guild Wars 2 you just jump in the fray and kill a big bad... mother of a big lizard and her spawns with those hundred other players and you got the credits, you're all on the same side, fighting environment together, you can even ressurect other, heal other, combo attacking with one another, there's no preparation to be made, no pre-requisite moments, gear check, or whatever, everything that other player throws at the enemy become your advantage while everything that the enemy throws at you won't be your 'team' disadvantage because there's so many fighting chance you'll have even in death. So yeah... there won't be any WTF <insert class here> comments (that slowly becomes an unofficial jargon of WOW) in Guild Wars 2

This also won't happen again :D

Kill Steal have been another matter that early players (and in some high level players on some MMORPG now) experienced, it's been softened a bit though on some AAA grade MMORPG, WOW makes it EXP from monsters less impacting on gameplay and even made regular mobs easy to solo (and also make some mobs on Fireland patch non taggable), Rift have Rifting event when you can temporarily joined a public group to crush element plane mobs (even when you don't join you still got the credit and bling blings based on your contribution), SWTOR (especially on early levels) always pits you on fight with group of mobs and sometimes kill stealing is not quite a kill stealing and more like a 'welcomed reinforcements'. I'm pretty sure Guild Wars 2 will made kill stealing so much an ancient thing that every other MMO created after it (if it still sports tag system) will be questionable and bashed, also probably will be cautiously tried (or step away from)

Well, I think that completes my reminiscence for today, Think I'll go out and socialize now, thanks :)

Friday, May 4, 2012

Diablo III Real Money/Currency Auction House: An Opinion

The most intriguing thing about Diablo 3 for me now is not the characters or even whether it has a good gameplay mechanic or not, but the feature of real money auction house which basically Blizzard's way to monetize player's trading legally while attempted to shut down the dreaded illegal Real Money Trading of a game. Basically as the name said: You trade virtual goods with real money currencies

The plan was revealed about a year ago on Blizzcon, and finalized some days ago, you can read the full disclosure here, short version: Blizzard will take some of your money, it's 15% from the price of equipment and @ 1.50$ for materials, gems, and other stackable commodities. If you want to transfer your earnings from battle.net balance to your bank/paypal account Blizz will take 15% from the total amount transferred

These ones below are purely my thought:

So if I have a stack (20) ex: iron ore (or any other crafting materials, I never played Diablo 3 and D3DB doesn't have any craft database up yet), sell it for $1 each, I'll get $20, blizz will take 15% of it so that's left me with $17, then I transferred everything to my PP account, Blizz take another swag of 15%, left me with $14.45, listing fees only deducted from the amount of my sold items and when my mats doesn't sell the listing fees will be returned to me.

I have $14.45 enough to cover my internet bill, or pay other subs, or I might left them on my battle.net balance so I can resub to WoW (UPDATE: apparently you can't buy subs with your battle.net balance since it's not listed here, thanks for samII to point it on Tobold's) imagine if I have rare longsword of something and I sold them for like $50, blizz will only take 1.00 from it and I left with about $41.225 when transferred, I can buy any X360 games!!!

and all I do, is play Diablo III!!! Of course this one is just a theory, but in my opinion Blizzard has just opened a virtually endless watering hole in which everyone can sell those waters, my line of work is mainly trading and I understand the law of supply and demand, but in this one the supplies are nearly endless so the price will become undercutting race between players because all you need is to have enough to pay the listing fees and when it didn't sold it'll be returned to you with the fees, in 48 hours, in just a short time you can arrange anything you want to sell or buy again, at those time you probably already acquired a legendary helmet because you're such an awesome player which you probably can sold at $100, probably...

But of course in my experience everything that involves a massive amount of money is always targeted, Blizzard needs to strengthen account security to prevent notorious hackers trying to get their hand on REAL money on battle.net balance, while in game adept Auction House Players will tried to control supply and demand with undercutting and overpricing. And yeah, players will always tried to exploit and circumvent any bugs and condition they've met, botters for example probably will rampage around while Diablo III is not a true MMORPG but it'll affect the amount of supplies, demands will become tricky since we already have stigmas that players who brought everything with real money currencies are considered exploiter and have instant gratification mentality, but in this one the instant gratification mentality is probably will be the best buyers =))

May 15th and three months after will be the test of this monetized system of Blizzard, will they gain profits or the system will be endlessly exploited and circumvented that it'll hurt Blizzard and the players themselves? Time will tell again I guess

Me? Oh no, I won't be playing it, beside having a stone age notebook the dungeon crawler genre kinda rubs me the wrong way, of course if I have the time on my hand (which is not) I'll buy it and roll a monk (or witch doctor), beside It'll be nostalgic too meet Tyrael again :)

Yeah, he's probably will still be faceless