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World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things

Over at Gamasutra they have an article about the lessons WoW is teaching players. The writter compares WoW to the lessons learned in Street Fighter. His main complaint is that players who spend more time have better loot and thus are better than someone who doesn't, regardless of skill.

Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards. People who invest less time "do not deserve" rewards. This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world. The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer. The very idea that time > skill is alien.

Personnally I think if you want a game where actual skill matters, you should play Guild Wars. Most MMORPG's are designed to waste your time, and that's why we play :)

Server Bandwidth Issues

Seems like we bit off more bandwidth than we can chew. We went through over 24GB's this month so far. Just a little more than we expected. I've lowered the graphical quality on the site to 75% jpegs from lossless pngs so that should lower the bandwidth by about 90%.

Lesson learned.

This is the first popular website I've ever been a part of (over half a million hits so far this month) and it wouldn't be possible without Crash's hard work. I pretty much just provide some content and suggestions along with debugging help. Big thanks to Crash without whom I'd still be on my old wow.visualization.ca site. Actually, I wouldn't even have that. I'd probably have some Frontpage site :)

World of Warcraft is A Feeling

Oldie but a goodie, this video is about 2 people going on a date in WoW. Cheezy and funny, just the way I like it.

The video comes from the fine folks over at Pure Pwnage. Be sure to check out the episodes of thier pro gamer mockumentary. It's good quality stuff, I like it. It's a bit of an aquired taste though. Kinda like the way Jeff K. is.

MonkeyMods v2.2 Is Out

There's 2 new features this time around.

First up, MonkeySpeed now has Battlegrounds support and should report less garbage values after zoning, which means less opening and closing the map to fix it. And MonkeyQuest will now try to figure out what quest that quest item in your pack belongs too.

Just a note about the way the MonkeyMods version numbers work:

v(major number).(new feature).(bug fixes)

I change all the version numbers for each MonkeyMod everytime I release, even if they didn't get any changes. This makes it easier to keep track of, even if it's different than the way most mod authors do things.

Enjoy!

EU Login Issues And More

GamesIndustry.biz has an interview with a couple Blizzard employees about the EU login issues plaguing servers.

It's just that suddenly a lot of people showed up - sort of like when you're at a party and suddenly 15 people walk through the door and they all want a drink. It's like, "Well, I'll get that to you, but it's going to take a bit of time," and that's what we've found.


There's also talk about The Burning Crusade, the five million subscriber mark, and even some Guild Wars.

Blizzard Hiring For Diablo III?

I just saw over on Blizzard's site that they are hiring quite a few positions for "The team behind Diablo I and II." Sounds like it could be for Diablo III development.

It's just pure speculation at this point. On a side note, Diablo II almost gave me carpal tunnel syndrome.

Check out the Employment Opportunities at Blizzard for more details.

New MonkeyQuest Feature

The next version of MonkeyQuest will have a new feature that will attempt to figure out what quest a quest item in your bag belongs too. It works by searching for the quest item name in the discriptions of your quests.

There's a problem though: alot of quests do NOT contain the proper quest item name in their discriptions. This means that even though MonkeyQuest doesn't find the quest an item belongs too, it doesn't mean it doesn't belong to a current quest you have.

I hope I didn't confuse you too much. Look for the new MonkeyQuest next Monday.

That Quest Item Belongs Too...