Power to the MMO people!

/begin rant

A good game is one that you enjoy (or enjoyed) playing. You can ‘burn out’ on a good game. (see WoW)

It sounds so simple, yet lately I’ve been reading a whole lot of contradictions in both posts and comments. You don’t think AoC is a good game if you just quit. Point blank, you don’t. It’s too early to be burned out. You can say it has nice features, that you see the potential it has, that you find some aspects of it interesting, but if you stop playing the game, it was NOT a good game for you.

And if you don’t enjoy it (even if you can’t actually explain why), you SHOULD cancel. The only vote MMO gamers have is with the dollar. You vote ‘yes, I support what this company is doing’ whenever you pay a monthly sub, and vote ‘no, your product is not what I want right now’ whenever you don’t. No amount of forum posting, blog bitching (this site included), podcast ranting is going to send as clear a message to a company as you hitting ‘cancel’ on the account page.

Don’t support unfinished games, we are beyond that point now.

/end rant

Google the crime dog.

Overall a sad story, but this has to be mentioned for stupid move of the year. How do you even defend that in court? ‘Oh I was just Googling it for fun…’ .

Not to give crime advice, but if you are going to do it, try not to Google how to do it first…

“Top of the world baby, top of the world!”

Banner 17 baby!

What a game. Unbelievable that the Lakers just mailed it in and quit on that game. Granted they were playing a clearly superior team, but still, you don’t just let yourself get beaten that badly on a global stage. Embarrassing, and all that ‘Kobe is the next Jordan’ talk can stop. Not only did Jordan never lose a finals series, he sure as hell never let his team get blown out like that.

Great turnaround, an amazing ending, bring on next season!

Stupid cool.

Found the link at Kill Ten Rats, but THIS is amazingly cool. The writeup is also quite witty. Job well done!

Time to make this blog do some work for me…

Long shot here, but does anyone work for, or know someone at Turbine Entertainment? If you do, please email me. (syncaine at yahoo dot com)

Thanks everyone.

/end shameless usage of blog for personal gain

I will kill you with nagging

Between my Man Captain and Aria’s Elf Minstrel, your little duo+herald do a LOT of yelling. I mean like 3-4 yells a regular mob. We kill bosses by making either eardrums bleed. I don’t mind the yelling, it’s kinda cool in an odd way, but I’m fairly sure the people who just moved in next to us might not enjoy our nightly ‘death by nagging voice’ gameplay. Too bad we have seniority in the building, so they will just have to suck it up and deal (or knock on our door to complain, like the previous tenants did…)

Oh and speaking of loud noise, I’m sure they will LOVE all of the great sounds from DoTA (‘triple kill’ ‘god-like’ and such) that blare out at stupidly high levels. DoTA has basically two sound levels, earthshaking and mute, and I don’t game on mute.

Nerd rage at it’s best/worst?

Nerd on nerd crime

It’s funny in a sad way I guess… But do we really need one nerd faction calling another nerd faction out? Can’t we just keep it to console vs comp, or casual vs hardcore? Do we really need to debate whether WoW is better/cool than D&D?

DoTA talk.

Monday already huh?

Played a good bit of DoTA this weekend, mostly getting my ass handed to me in TDA games while still re-learning everything. Due to the game being basically 100% player skill, the learning curve depends almost completely on who you play with/against.

A good example happened in two consecutive games. Game one, an amazingly skilled, and as I later found out, professionally paid player is on my team. He leads most ganks and hunts down any player getting a bit too powerful, all while building himself up. We win fairly easily, he goes something like 25-5. Next game, same guy is in the game, but this time on the other team. He goes 34-2, and the game is a complete wash about 15 minutes in. Game one I hold my own, ending with a 8-6 record. Second game, I go 2-10 and never make anything beyond treads/bracers for items. Team chat was also entertaining, as game one was all happy ‘we are doing great’ talk, while game two was all finger pointing and ‘you are a noob’ talk.

I’m still amazed that DoTA continues to be so polished and entertaining after all these years. Nothing beats a well balanced (in terms of player skill) game that goes down to the final, epic 5v5 fight to settle it. And while frustrating, it’s also entertaining to watch a highly skilled player just dominate the field, using clearly refined techniques and skills. A lot can be learned just by watching a replay from that player’s perspective.

Friday + Sunny = Win?

Good weather makes you feel guilty about playing an MMO, discuss.

PS: So nice out here today in MA.

South Park and the Patriots.

Somewhat of a bittersweet post today, considering it is related to the disaster that was the last Super Bowl. However, despite the pain of reliving that memory, these two South Park clips are indeed quite entertaining.

Enjoy!