Culture

It's been a week of remembrances for past and present members of the Ultima Online dev team. The title's 15th anniversary has offered ample opportunity for stories from the early days, the latest of which come courtesy of Lord British himself (and no, it's not the one about his in-game death).

Richard Garriott tells of his run-in with a player thief bent on ruining the game experience for a new player. It's an amusing anecdote that illustrates how UO's early incarnation led to plenty of unexpected gameplay scenarios. "After [the incident], I began to think more carefully about the rules we ourselves put in the game, and the inevitable play styles that would come of it," Garriott writes.

The City of Heroes community has been great in rallying to save the game, but I'm wondering whether that's enough.

If you missed it, this week has not been a good one for efforts to keep the game alive. I'm not going to reprint everything laid out in TonyV's recent post, but the short version is that there are currently no signs that things are changing. NCsoft has set up an email for players to send letters, one that I suspect is not read vigilantly, and there have been no signs that any of the various talks about the game's future have resulted in anything.

It's the email thing that really set me to wondering about whether or not City of Heroes fans are the right people to be protesting. While I love you guys -- beyond a shadow of a doubt -- there's a certain revolutionary spirit necessary for an effective protest. I'm not entirely certain that we've got that. And if there was ever a chance to save the game, we may just be unable to do what's necessary.

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There are two schools of thought when it comes to handling achievements in MMOs. The first is to keep it mostly private, the second is to herald it to the world entire. Private achievements are great ways to pat the player on the back while keeping him or her modest. Not everyone likes achievement spam, anyway.

Yet I've come to prefer games that do broadcast achievements guild-wide. Why? Because not all of us are so attention-seeking that we constantly write about what we're doing... but if the game's doing that for us, oh well. It's not me being egotistical, it's the game's doing. But if you happen to notice what I'm doing? So much the better.

I genuinely like seeing what my guildies are up to as well. It feels like we do come together for the typical "grats" after an achievement notice, or even the rare "holy crap, that's awesome!" for significant milestones. Of course, sometimes these games can get silly with the number of trivial achievements, so it can hurt the legitimacy of the real ones.

What do you think? Do you like having achievements broadcast guild-wide, or would you prefer it kept quiet (or even turned off)?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

City of Heroes players have been rallying around the movement to save the game ever since the shutdown announcement was made. It's been nearly a month with no official response regarding the movement's requests from NCsoft aside from a special email address, and that's enough to make almost anyone start to despair. But a new fan-made video is meant to help inspire the protest, mixing machinima footage with narration, screenshots, and music to produce a tribute to the immense movement to avoid the game's demise.

Starting with the unexpected August 31st announcement, the video shows off excerpts from several of the news stories surrounding the announcement and the major in-game rally at Atlas Park, with footage by several notable fans. The narration is spliced together from a variety of sources, including some quotes from our own Massively Speaking. The video also contains links and information for anyone looking to take part in the Save CoH movement. You can see the full video just past the break.

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I figured that after the last column's focus on World of Warcraft, I might as well feature the other major November 2004 MMO release: EverQuest II. EverQuest II embraced high fantasy to its core, and the soundtrack for the original game certainly reflects this.

SOE tapped composer Laura Karpman for the project in the early 2000s. The four-time Emmy-winner spent time getting acquainted with the first EverQuest before creating the music for the sequel. Following EQII's completion, Karpman remained on staff at SOE from 2005 to 2006 as the resident composer. She would leave the team after doing the score for EQII's first expansion, Desert of Flames.

"This was one of the most rewarding opportunities I have ever had," Karpman said in 2003. "We had an amazing time recording the score in Prague, a wonderful city with equally great players."

The one-hour soundtrack came with the collector's edition of the game, and a friend mailed me his copy, which I deeply appreciated. There's a lot to enjoy about this score, so let's dig in!

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I'm a big fan of MMO soundtracks -- heck, of game soundtracks in general, really. It's rare that I turn off the in-game tunes in favor of my own playlist, but I've been doing just that recently when it comes to The Secret World.

No disrespect meant to composers Marc Canham and Simon Poole, of course; I bought the soundtrack, and I love that creepy main title riff. A modern setting goes well with modern music, though, or in my case, the sonic stylings of Pink Floyd. I can't put my finger on why David Gilmour's soulful guitar solos and Roger Waters shrieking vocals go so well with the TSW, but they do.

What about you, early risers? Assuming you play your own music while playing your favorite MMO, which artist fits your game best?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

Have you ever been curious what, exactly, a community manager does from an insider perspective? Here to help you with that is Brian Green, who's developed for both Meridian 59 and Storybricks. Green wrote an essay on how community management is often misunderstood and how it can be both effectively and ineffectively handled.

Green went through the daily process of a CM's job to provide information for both developers and players, citing the difficult balance in handling that two-way street. He said it's important to keep PR as divorced from community management as possible, otherwise it damages the communication "loop" between CMs, players, and developers.

He finishes by examining the recent instance of ArenaNet's CM team using Reddit to discuss players' behavior and names. "The problem is that this was quite obviously a PR exercise and not really proper community management," he noted, going on to say that this might have set the wrong tone for the community's in-game behavior and caused a "toxic allowance" to build up for later on down the road.

If you're at all interested in MMOs, it's been nigh-impossible not to learn about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion through osmosis if nothing else. If you're currently playing the game, of course, buying the expansion and logging in is a no-brainer. But if you're like many people with an old account and some mixed memories about the game, buying the expansion isn't a given. It all comes down to the expansion's features and how satisfied you are with your current games.

Maybe the promise of Pandaren, new levels, new systems, and a new talent system has lured you back into the fold. Or perhaps those same changes have turned you off from Mists of Pandaria. Perhaps it's even deeper than that -- perhaps one of the previous expansions killed your interest in the game to the point that this expansion can't revive it. So today we want to know: Are you returning for Mists of Pandaria, or are you staying on the sidelines?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

If there's one thing the EVE Online community is well known for (apart from the occasional colossal scam or game-breaking exploit), it's producing great videos. In its nine-year history, EVE has birthed some very talented video editors who have produced everything from political propaganda and instructional videos to amazing cinematic stories and machinima. The official game trailers have always turned heads, but I'd bet a significant number of current players were first introduced to EVE through player-made works of art like Kyoko Sakoda's War Has Come or Mercenary Coalition's Lacrimosa Tortuga.

It's easy to fixate on only the best EVE videos ever made, but in reality, dozens of new videos are released every month. Some are cinematic story pieces or alliance propaganda videos designed to motivate the troops, but most are just compilations of good PvP fights. While PvP videos are unlikely to grab the universal acclaim of incredible films like Clear Skies or Future Proof, they arguably show the very core of EVE at its best: good fights, solid strategy, and pretty explosions.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at four great new EVE Online videos produced just in the past few months.

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I can see now what many of you might say about IMVU, especially after watching the embedded video. I know that many players will find the game, the world, and the virtual social connection nothing but an excuse for strangers to get together to talk dirty. As soon as I saw the game, I knew that it was trying to cover a few different bases, but I never worried about the appearance of virtual sex or sleazy creeps. Remember, I've been playing Second Life since 2004, and even that world is horribly misrepresented when someone says it's "nothing but virtual sex." That's simply not true.

IMVU is a much more stripped-down social experience than Second Life, but it still holds its own. I actually found myself enjoying the heck out of certain aspects probably because I like a game to actually work as promised. IMVU runs in a browser-like environment but still looks respectable most of the time.

I am as surprised as anyone that I had a darn good time.

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Ah, what a week in livestreaming for the Massively crew! Luckily, no one was discouraged by the fact that I was unable to stream my usual amount because I was waiting on a new PC to arrive. What brave soldiers, what fearless souls! I begged them to go on without me, and... well, they did. Pretty easily, actually. Be sure to bookmark our livestream schedule page so you won't miss another!

Anyway, what did we do on to stream? Well, tons of stuff. I took some of the very best streams from last week and assembled them in one easy-to-swallow pill. All you have to do is sit back, relax, and watch the wackiness! Like what? Like Richie taking on some more Guild Wars 2 in beautiful HD; MJ leaping bravely into The Secret World, EverQuest II, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, City of Heroes and Aion; and Mike PvPing in EVE Online and World of Tanks. I rounded things off with my one stream of the week: a look at IMVU, a social MMO for those who really, really like to go goth.

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Two weeks back, I received a comment asking, in all seriousness, what was the deal with roleplaying. The author of said comment opined that as near as he or she could tell, it was mostly just talking like your character and developing a bunch of strange romances.

If that comment had only listed vampires in there, really, I could have stopped writing this column altogether.

All right, there's more to it than that. While I've spent the past 120 installments of the column dealing with creating characters, playing respectfully, and producing stories, I've never actually put down a definition of what roleplaying is. I've never liked opening off by defining roleplaying because it's an awkward beast, and the explanation is always shoehorned elsewhere. So today I'm going to kick off at least one and possibly more columns answering the very basics, starting with the obvious -- what the heck is roleplaying?

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One of the main reasons I enjoy covering mobile MMOs is the fact that many gamers have access to a poor connection at best, and my articles might offer these fellow geeks a selection of games to play. I often take some of the things in my life for granted, like my healthy dogs or the one cup of coffee I have in the morning, but I never take my internet connection for granted, especially when I'm reminded every time I pay the bill just how much it costs me. It's an awesome 150/65 Mb/s, and I tend to get speeds pretty close to that. I often tell people that because my wife works at home with me, our internet connection is our "work vehicle."

But many of my friends complain about having a really bad connection to the internet. Some of it is the result of location, but a lot is because companies can actually throttle the signal, providing unlimited yet barely workable internet. While there are several titles out there that are playable on almost any connection, throttling can kill gaming for many of us. So just how bad is it?

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Have you ever wanted to wander Azeroth in virtual seclusion, flying completely under the radar of folks who may have you on their friends list? If so, Blizzard's new "appear offline" functionality will likely put a smile on your face.

"All of your Real ID friends, BattleTag friends, and character-level friends will see you as offline in their friends list whenever you're logged into the game," Blizzard says on its Battle.net website. This is assuming you don't set your social status option to available, busy, or away, of course. The new functionality is slated for World of Warcraft as well as StarCraft II and Diablo III. WoW's version of the feature should surface sometime after Mists of Pandaria.

The Massively tip line is a curious creature. It's cantankerous, unpredictable, and just as likely to bite your leg as it is to rub itself against your shins and let loose with a rumble of contentment. Despite the low signal-to-noise ratio, we do get useful info from our tipsters, often in the form of breaking news, obscure and interesting tidbits, and ideas for further coverage.

This week's Firing Line falls under that last category, as we received word from one tipster that something is rotten in the state of Firefall.

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