Making the Big Screen

After watching the boat PVP video to make sure it uploaded without any issues, I saw a curious related video. It was by IGN and it was talking about the Stygian Abyss expansion. I decided to check it out.



To my surprise the game footage they showed looked very familiar.



Our Guild has made the big screen! Well internet screen. A screen is a screen. At least one person likely watched it on their television. Maybe.

Copy Don't Create

Someone has put together a slideshow explaining where Zynga got all their game ideas. It is being discussed a lot on Slashdot. There is also a mention at the end of the Slashdot summary about the story I talked about yesterday. They called it an "underground platinum purchase program". Sounds catchy.

The how I would resurrect UO articles are still in the works. I have got some of the next one done and have plenty of ideas for all of them. UOGuide has just been taking up all my UO time lately with the new Event Calendar. I did a few fixes today and will likely work on some more improvements tomorrow.

One startling figure I stumbled upon today was UOGuide's database query count has increased 4x since the Mediawiki update. I suspect it has something to do with the search suggest. The site appears to be holding up, but I may disable it for a day or two to see if it drops the query number back to normal.

$500 Buy-in on your MMO

It has been pointed out that there is a top-teir purchasing service for Zynga's games (creator of Farmville). If you want the most bang for your buck you need to spend $500. Oh wait, that is actually $500 or more.

How can such a thing be anything but completely irresponsible of a game company. These points you buy get you absolutely nothing but virtual goods. If someone wants to spend $500 on these points then go ahead. But you don't encourage that type of behavior by giving a bonus for spending so much.

When someone is addicted to a video game, perhaps Everquest, at least they are not spending all their money on nothing (unless they are buying swords and stuff). Casual games are going to end up getting regulated similar to the gambling industry if this keeps up.

The worst part about the whole thing is you have to pay by wire transfer. They don't take credit cards at this level. Obviously because buyer's remorse is big factor. Oh you bought 1,000,000 pounds of feed for your cows, but realize it will take 200 real life years to use it all up? Boo hoo.

New Event Calendar on UOGuide

I made a calendar from scratch to keep track of UO events on UOGuide. Head to any page on the site to see it. Major development headaches include:

• Working with Mediawiki in general
• 1/3 of the development time was spent dealing with time zone conversions
• Figuring out how to do the popup when hovering over a day on the calendar
• Thinking I was near completion until I remember 2 more things that I couldn't launch without doing..................a couple times

I hope it becomes popular and useful for the UO community.