In the last few days I’ve had off, I have been able to catch up on a lot of the games that I missed. I played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Halo 3, God of War 2 and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Mass Effect, BioShock and Assassin’s Creed.

Read More “The Death of High Fidelity in Games?”

Five Short Video Game Industry Keynotes (Magical Wasteland)

So, there’s an interesting side note to the post I made a while back on cheating, and the discussion surrounding RMT. A whole lot of people seem to think that the sort of info in Internet strategy guides isn’t cheating.

As someone who has been gaming for thirty years, I want to pat these people condescendingly on the head, and tell them to stop trying to make themselves feel better. But they happen to be highly influential bloggers, so I had better refrain from sarcasm (man, am I turning tetchy in my old age or what?). 😉

Here’s how Ten Ton Hammer puts it:

Read More “You are all cheaters!”

Michael Zenke declares himself the law-giver, and the top five trends are:

• the rise of “little” games, meaning indie, browser-based, and social worlds. And, for some reason, Maple Story even though I don’t see how you can ever call it little.
• Big MMORPG failures, which lists Vanguard, Gods and Heroes, and Auto Assault. Now, all three of these had radically different problems, so I am not sure there’s a commonality there other than the fact that perhaps it was brought home to players in a more comprehensive way that Making MMOs Is Hard(tm).
• World of Warcraft extending its dominance, with celeb endorsements, Toyota commercials, etc.
• Mega-big clashes of the titans, with the Activision Blizzard announcement, plus Warhammer waiting in the wings.
• Microtransactions versus subscriptions, for which he uses the now-infamous panel at AGDC as the proverbial tinder that lit the fire.

That’s a pretty good list, I have to admit. I might have combined the “failures” and the “clash of titans” ones in order to insert the investment and hype surrounding virtual worlds and ancillary services, though — in some ways, it is going to have a longer-term impact.

He goes on to suggest that a game designer throwdown TV show would be entertaining. I’m game. 🙂

In the latest exchange, we see Tobold proposing a thought experiment on RMT. Catch up on the previous steps in the debate here:

1. Tobold’s original proposal
2. My response
3. His disagreement
4. My more detailed response

In his post, Tobold suggests basically choosing between a WoW with limited to no trade, and WoW with an RMT service and a few other features — bind on equip instead of pickup, mostly — and labels this as his interpretation of my idea. FWIW, I don’t think he quite got what I was saying. I said in the previous post, the issue is actually incentive structures in the game design. That was pretty vague. So here’s my take on what would be needed to make these games more RMT-resistant.

1. Remove all stats from all equipment.
2. There is no step #2.

This design advice is worth exactly what it is priced at on the tin. But there’s some justification after the fold:

Read More “DeRMTingWoW”