Thursday, June 21, 2012

Help Us Stress Our Servers on June 27

From ArenaNet's Blog:




We were very pleased with how our servers performed during our second Beta Weekend Event, but we want to gather additional data on how they operate under load before the next one.

That’s where you come in.

All players who have pre-purchased Guild Wars 2 are invited to participate in our upcoming stress test. This four-hour test event will run on


Wednesday, June 27th, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT (GMT-7).

We won’t wipe characters for this event, so if you played in our previous betas, you can pick up right where you left off. All we need you to do is log in and have fun—leave the stress to us!

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Blade & Soul Open Beta in Korea


PlayNC Korea kicks off their Blade & Soul Open Beta on June 21st, 2012! For those of you who aren't aware yet, PlayNC removed the fatigue system so you'll be able to level up to your hearts content. If you're in the US and lucky enough to have a Korean SSN, I suggest you check this game out. I would definitely recommend this game for players who are looking into a fast paced oriental fantasy action MMORPG.

1UP's 2012's Best RPGs So Far... and Yet to Come

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Cover Story: Halfway through 2012, we take stock of the best role-players so far and up ahead.

The role-playing genre may not be quite as dead as some people would have you believe. In fact, we've seen quite a few in the first half of the year, some of which were downright excellent. And you can expect even more in the months to follow. We've pulled together a dozen of 2012's standout RPG titles 2012 -- the six best RPGs we've played already, and the six we're looking forward to the most. This steady drip-feed of role-playing content guarantees we'll never extricate ourselves from the shackles of our consoles and PCs. There'll always be one more level to grind, one more super-boss to crush, one more piece of sweet loot to collect and equip. Ah well. It's a grim burden, but somebody's got to bear it.

Destructoid Editorial Review of E3

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E3 is kind of bullshit. Though not many will say it, developers, publishers, investors, and media alike think it. And so, it’s not really a controversial statement, except for the one group that isn’t aware of the expo’s privy charades. I’m speaking of the general public. 


For a show that is supposed to inform consumers, E3, in recent years, seems to confuse and disappoint game enthusiasts more than anything. I continue to love the spectacle and insanity that E3 brings, but lately I’ve been wondering what purpose this show serves in 2012. It’s supposed to be about more than the press bellyaching over promotional practices and internet users getting upset when publishers show up without a surprise in tow, right?


It’s easy to forget, among all the giant LED screens and flashing lights, that E3 is an industry expo that is supposed to inform the media, the public, and investors as to what the future may hold. As much as I love the thing, it’s hard to deny the truth: It fails miserably at this. It has become a show where Nintendo can say, "Sorry, no price or release details," while publishers show flashy demos on the floor that only roughly resemble the products that will eventually hit store shelves.


This is the expo gaming our industry currently runs, but is it really the one we deserve?

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I just worry about the consumers and dedicated gamers, like you guys, who are easily manipulated one way or other by the demos shown to the public at E3. Before you go aggro and write a silly article about how games are becoming homogenized, read our previews of the behind-closed-doors demos and don’t take the gameplay trailers posted on YouTube at face value.


E3 is bigger than investors, the press, and you guys. Now, it’s about everyone. It’s about getting CNN talking about the Wii U and some guy with a spray-on tan calling Far Cry 3 a “Halo-killer” or some shit because what the hell else is he going to say about a medium he barely understands? While publishers may continue to dress their games up in the most generic way possible to reach the most people, trust that developers will continue to evolve franchises and create something new, more often than not. 


You may think you have access to everything at E3 from your home, but there is still a hidden world only open to a select few behind closed door at the show. It’s in these rooms that E3 continues to be what it once was: A place where developers can show their games and players can get excited alongside them. Once you ignore the hype, see through the deception, and prepare for the inevitable disappointment, E3 is the same as its ever been. And by that, I mean's it's incredibly stupid bullshit.



Is it Fun? Colin Johanson on How ArenaNet Measures Success

Read full article here...



To begin this blog post, let me pose a question: How do you measure the success of an MMO?

Historically, it’s been easy to point to success with traditional MMOs: subscription numbers were the ultimate means a company used to measure how well a game was doing, and customers typically looked at those same numbers as well to gauge the success of the game. The number of concurrent users—how many players are online at a given time—was also important, but that number was usually hidden from users, since it typically painted a less rosy picture of a game’s health when compared to the number of active subscriptions.

Now let me pose a second question: If the success of a subscription-based MMO is measured by the number of people paying a monthly fee, how does that impact game design decisions?

The answer can be found in the mechanics and choices made in subscription-based MMOs, which keep customers actively playing by chasing something in the game through processes that take as long as possible. In other words, designers of traditional MMOs create content systems that take more time to keep people playing longer. If this is your business motivation and model so you keep getting paid, it makes sense and is an incredibly smart thing to do, and you need to support it.

When your game systems are designed to achieve the prime motivation of a subscription-based MMO, you run the risk of sacrificing quality to get as much content in as possible to fill that time. You get leveling systems that take insane amounts of grind to gain a level, loot drop systems that require doing a dungeon with a tiny chance the item you want can drop at the end, raid systems that need huge numbers of people online simultaneously to organize and play, thousands of wash/repeat item-collection or kill-mob quests or dailies with flavor text support, the best stat gear requiring crazy amounts of time to earn, etc.

But what if your business model isn’t based on a subscription? What if your content-design motivations aren’t driven by the need to create mechanics that keep people playing as long as possible? When looking at content design for Guild Wars 2, we’ve tried to ask the question: What if the development of the game was based on…wait for it…fun?
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his metric of success impacted a lot of our early content-related design decisions for Guild Wars 2. Some examples include:

  • Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.
  • Fun impacts decisions. Every time you finish a dungeon you get tokens you can trade in for reward items that you want, rather than having a small chance of getting it as a drop, because it’s more fun to always get rewarded for finishing with something you want to have!
  • Fun impacts development. Explorable dungeons have multiple paths you can take and random events. Because of this you don’t feel like you need to play the same dungeon over and over again if you want to chase the prestigious rewards at the end, but can instead mix up that experience to keep it fresh and fun.
  • Fun impacts customization. The event and personal story systems allow you to get a sense of customization from your characters. Playing through the game, each character can experience completely different content, and the world can always stay fresh and new in the pursuit of new story lines, and an ever-changing dynamic event world. It means going back to a place you’ve already been with a character can be fun, and it means making a new character on an entirely different personal story chain can be fun as well.
  • Fun impacts gameplay. The pursuit of fun in content led us to make many gameplay decisions, including:Everyone who helps kill a creature gets experience and loot, so you’re not competing with other players; everyone gets rewarded for events with karma they can spend to buy rewards they want, rather than get a random roll of stuff they might not want; content scales in difficulty, so if more people show up, there is still stuff for you to do; everyone is able to revive one another, so you view other players as assets that can help you achieve your goals, rather than people who might get in your way; everyone can harvest resource nodes and get the rewards in the world together, rather than racing other people to them who might steal it from you. All of these things are just more fun!
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