World of Warcraft – Page 6

December 22, 2011December 22, 2011

Gaming Companies Should Embrace Second Life

I’ve made a couple of posts now about Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’ve also over the years made posts about World Of Warcraft, Eve-Online and City Of Heroes. The thing is, all of these games should have a Second Life presence, especially now that we have the advent of mesh.

Second Life is perfect for gaming companies to setup a sim or two displaying their wares, they can have video promotions on touch, they can show part of their world on a sim, they can’t do combat of course but with a little bit of careful scripting they could provide some very basic quests, but most 0f all they can show people how their worlds look, they can even sell outfits and own the IP and when it comes to intellectual property infringement, all of these companies have the power to slam a copybotters backside from here to kingdom come.

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December 2, 2011

The Revolution’s Still Huge Bandwidth Away

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has produced a couple of excellent discussion posts recently. The first points out why Skyrim is nothing like Second Life. The reasons are of course technical, Second Life is a dynamic world, quite possibly the greatest dynamic virtual world on the planet. Skyrim is more static, I’m sure at some point there will be updates to this visually stunning and engaging looking single player game, but it is a single player game, the content is downloaded and it is far easier to get top notch performance in those circumstances. This isn’t intended to take away from the excellent game of Skyrim, but the reality is that dynamic content created by thousands of users is far harder to optimise.

The first post, where Hamlet points out how long it takes scenes to rez in Second Life is an important introduction to his second post, where has asks why the Linden Realms games aren’t included in the client download, because that would improve performance for people who are playing Linden Realms games, that Linden Lab controlled area is not as dynamic as other areas of Second Life, this is an important point to note. There was a time when Linden Lab’s tiny client was ahead of the game, downloading patches for the likes of World Of Warcraft could take ages, but with the rise of broadband internet, Linden Lab could make their client larger without much of an inconvenience to users, the Mac client is already bigger than the PC client and I don’t see many complaints about that.

The second post includes comments from former Linden’s Pathfinder and Qarl as well as a comment from Linden Lab CEO and Aston Villa fan Rod Humble.

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August 5, 2011August 5, 2011

Blizzard Move Into Micro Transaction Business

The announcment that the forthcoming Diablo III will have an auction house system catches my eye because we’re talking an auction house here that can result in cashing out real money from the game. The currency based system will be optional and if players prefer they will be able to trade with inworld gold instead, but it will be seen as an interesting development in the gaming world, micro transactions and the ability to cash out have been a strong driving force behind Second Life, seeing this system extended to a game is interesting, from the FAQ:

Can players choose to get cash from currency-based auction house sales, instead of having the proceeds deposited into their Battle.net account?

Yes, as an advanced feature, players will have the option of attaching an account with an approved third-party payment service to their Battle.net account. Once this has been completed, proceeds from the sale of items in the currency-based auction house can be deposited into their third-party payment service account. “Cashing out” would then be handled through the third-party payment service. Note that this process will be subject to applicable fees charged by Blizzard and the third-party payment service. Also, any proceeds from the sale of items in the currency-based auction house that have been deposited into the Battle.net account will not be transferrable to the third-party payment service account. Not all regions will support this advanced feature at launch. Region-specific details, as well as details regarding which third-party payment services will be supported and the fee that Blizzard will charge for the cash-out process, will all be provided at a later date.

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June 22, 2011June 22, 2011

Looking a Gift Horse In The Mouth

As I am not certified for a SL press pass, I look to the SL press for news and information on things happening at Linden Lab, I used to look at the main blog but that seems to be in sore need of some care and attention. The forums aren’t so bad, and the mesh forum for those interested in mesh, is interesting viewing, even for those who don’t like mesh, it’s interesting viewing! However for general information I keep an eye on the SL press and SL Press member extraordinaire; Inara Pey, has an interesting post regarding SL8B, or more to the point about the lack of Linden involvement at SL8B. I agree with the main thrust of Inara’s post, to quote in part:

“SL8B represents a marvellous opportunity for LL to reach out to the user community and communicate with us – so where are they?

I’m not talking about glad-handing or getting involved in in-depth discussions about who, what, when, where, how and why; rather I’m talking about getting up on stage and giving an overview of what is coming down the road, thing like:

What is happening with Viewer 2?
What is Mesh going to look like? (Given many haven’t see the results from the Beta Grid)
What is happening around service improvements like Group chat and server-side lag issues?”

The SL8B Blog itself is on its own blog, containing far more information about happenings than Linden Lab’s own official blog, have they outsourced the birthday event or something? I know Linden Lab officially take a hands off approach to SLCC.

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March 12, 2011March 12, 2011

Moderation and Common Sense

I think I’ve discovered why my forum post asking if people were participating in or attending Fantasy Faire 2011 was nuked, leading to a moderator warning for me, it seems that the guidelines on community participation forbid references to websites if they promote specific merchants or services and the Fantasy Faire 2011 website does have merchants who are attending the event there, I still don’t see how that really falls foul of the spamming reference, or why it’s forbidden in the Roleplaying forum as it’s a Roleplaying event, but there you go.

Others have found that referencing other wesbites that have the answer to a question in the answers section, also ends up with your post being deleted. The thing lacking here is of course common sense, and it’s all the more galling when you consider that Linden Lab are happy to push people towards Facebook and Twitter to find information about what’s going on in Second Life.

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