Matt runs Iron Realms. They do Achaea, among other things. He’s also a contentious coot. 😉 Should be fun! Over here.

There’s an exhaustively researched article over at the Harvard Business Review on this topic.

Among the tidbits they drop are some Second Life stats:

• 165,000 total active residents,
• of which 65,000 are paying in some form,
• and “over 3000” are making real world money,
• averaging $20,000 a year each (skewed by the really high earners, of course).

In thinking about the UO resource system in recent posts (1, 2, 3), I also got to thinking about other things that we either wanted to or tried to get the NPCs to do. Today, NPCs have gradually evolved more and more towards being quest dispensers. Originally, we wanted NPCs that would give the illusion of life.

But there were a few bumps on the road, and today NPCs in all the games pretty much suck.

Read More “Why don’t our NPCs…”

Nick Montfort has a pair of posts on riddles over at Grand Text Auto.

In the first post, he suggests that:

Read More “Hints and Riddles”