Now Posting on New Website

Hey everyone, I have made some changes to my blog. You can now find it at www.jcthebuilder.com. I am actually going to start posting again and playing UO. See you there.

Tales From Britannia #1

My recent diatribe has caused me to reminisce about the past. I thought it would be nice to post some old UO stories.

This is a story of a pre-Trammel event that my good friend Danelle D'babrak had setup. She owned a nice Two-Story Wood and Plaster house near the entrance of Ice Dungeon. It was a very popular PVP spot in those days.



She had decided this week to allow the house to decay. The day it had turned to the "In Danger of Collapsing" stage there was quite a crowd. I think there were between 10 to 20 people there.

Now lets take a moment to explain an old game mechanic. Back then you could declare your house as public or private, but it worked differently. Public houses simply left the front door unlocked and let you place vendors. A private house still let people inside but they were flagged attackable to the owner and friends.

So the crowd had gathered and made their way all through the house due to the doors being left unlocked. A couple hours before the collapse was due to happen a situation presented itself where a person we didn't like very much was almost trapped between some furniture. We prepared to attack and waited for the perfect moment.

When the time looked right I shut the front door and we struck. I can't remember whether we killed him or not. We probably did. The funny thing is my closing the door refreshed the house. The jig was up and everyone went home.

But they came back the next time =]

I will post more stories in the future.

I am not dead yet

I realize I should post an update here. I am side tracked by real life stuff. My work on UOGuide has ground to a halt. This blog is also suffering. I still want to get to the series on how I would revamp UO.

I hope to have more time to spend on UO related stuff in the near future. If I don't manage to post again, have some good holidays.

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.