Factions is on the Brink of Ruination

I just had to post a quick rant after reading the developers idea on changing Town Sigil corruption.

So, instead of being a constantly ongoing battle open for potentially all towns, the game instead would be a series of concentrated battles for single town at a time. At any given time, all online players would be able to tell what town's capture window is open. The idea is to capture that town's sigil, hold it for a short time to corrupt it, then successfully return it to the town. Failure of any faction to do so means the town goes uncontrolled until it comes up for capture again the next day.

This just can't be happening. I was so excited about them updating factions. But now every change they unveil or idea posted is dreadful. This latest one just lowers my expectations to the lowest point.

Everything about this proposed idea is wrong. Instead of huge epic fights over all 8 cities, you are regulated to a single one at a time. One week a city will be available at 2PM, the next at 2AM. Why did they take out 24 hour corruption timers? Because it was so difficult to guard for that amount of time. Now they want you to fight 24 hours a day every day. No 3 day breaks. The entire concept of town ownership is tossed out the window. Towns are going to be swapping hands every day.

I really wish Draconi and the gang was still in charge.

Kitchen Sink Forever

There is yet another video out showing footage of the infamous Duke Nukem Forever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CwHzclyYnI

From this is becomes crystal clear (even though we knew already) why the game was never released. They tried to cram too much stuff into one game. Underwater, driving, interactive slot machines, destructible environments...................plus whatever else we haven't heard of yet. That is just too much for a brand new game to take on.

You can add some neat stuff here and there. Maybe vehicles. Maybe underwater. But not all at once.

They claim the game was close to release. In reality it wasn't. They just kept adding more and more. Development was destined to go on for eternity. Or in another word, forever.

Lord of Ultima

I guess I missed the initial announcement because today I read on Kotaku that Lord of Ultima is now in open beta. It is a browser based game in which you build cities and do battle against the world. I am trying it out and it is okay so far. I've played a couple browser games and this seems to have a lot more features than most. It also has pretty graphics.

Besides the name, it doesn't have a thing to do with the Ultima or Ultima Online universe. Everything is generic fantasy. Perhaps there is some stuff later on or little easter eggs. The naming is purely to bring back nostalgic feelings. Get people to play.......and eventually pay.

While the game is free to play, there is a store where you can purchase diamonds. I assume other stuff will be sold in the future. Limited edition items or city decorations. The possibilities are as endless to which a wallet can be opened.

Will have to see how this game turns out.

In other news, Markee Dragon's redesigned website has opened. I have to say I am not a fan of the new design. The old one was unique and interesting. Now it is generic game blog 37452 with standard game screenshot backdrops. Also what is up with going with a blue color scheme? Even the dragon is now blue! Bleh.

Activmoneyism

The price of the first Modern Warfare 2 map pack has been revealed. What would you expect to pay for some new maps? Does $3 sound good? Well there are going to be 5 of them. Maybe $5 or $8 or even $9.99.

Tough luck. It is $15! And there isn't anything else announced thus far. Just 5 new multiplayer maps. That is 1/4 the cost of the original game. It is quite obvious this is a huge money grab. There are 25 of million of copies of MW2 out there. What is $15 x 10 million? More money than 99% of video games will ever make. For 5 freakin maps, two of which are being brought back from COD:4.

It is clear now why Activision forced out the people who were possibly standing in the way of this gold train. They probably want to start pumping map packs out en mauss. They could easily be doing at least 1 new map a month. Keep people hooked on MW2 like it is a MMO. In the mean time they are not patching any game bugs or issues, just major exploits.

Even more astonishing is Activision is holding back royalty payments to Infinity Ward staff. Delayed payments means interest. The longer they hold the money, the more Activision reaps.

There is just no end to their corporate greed.

House Cleaning Dragon

It looks like Markee Dragon is cleaning up his act. He was never a saint to begin with, somehow getting himself perma-banned from UO way back. In a story he explained when Origin invited him to a fanfest, he told them he was banned. They unbanned him I think. Ah, the good ol' days.

He posted a video announcing the changes to his website and a bit on why it was happening. It boils down to game companies not liking his support of breaking their game rules (item sales, scripting, botting, etc.). So it is hard to do business with people who you are causing headaches for. I imagine he is doing this mostly because he has some new business plan or idea, and that revenue from these illicit operations was simply not worth holding on to anymore.

Oh well.

I Realize This Blog is Here

I haven't been playing UO lately. After a month of Stygian Abyss, I had done pretty much everything the expansion had to offer. I ran the two new champion spawns dozens of times, worked up Mysticism, and slayed all the Peerless. It got boring pretty quick so I took a break. I planned on starting back again in January, but I was having serious wireless connectivity issues. In fact I still am, just having mailed the router back to the manufacturer for repair today. But I am mostly not playing because there is nothing to do.

I play UO to PVP. For the past 8 years there has only been one type of PVP available: Champion Spawns. I've run them all a thousands of times. Gotten every power scroll in duplicates. It just isn't appealing anymore. I was very excited when factions was being worked on again. There were a lot of nice changes and additions. Unfortunately that no longer appears to be the case. First Draconi is let go and now Sakkarah. It is hard to be enthusiastic when EA is making every effort to prevent UO from being updated.

There are more faction changes in the works, mentioned on Stratics forums and in the House of Commons chat. However, it appears they are dumbing down the system. Reducing it from 4 to 3 factions, reworking points so they are about doing all different things instead of killing other players. To me it sounds like they are trying to shoehorn Warhammer Online ideas into UO. And if you didn't know, Warhammer Online isn't doing very well. In fact it probably has many fewer subscribers than UO.

I make no promises when the next blog post will be.

Pet Dyes

I've come to the conclusion that I'm just not good at blogging.

Quite out of the blue the developers wanted to survey people on pet dyes. This was apparently part of the Stygian Abyss expansion, yet did not come out during open beta even though it was implemented. We were also informed that closed beta testers had been polled on this potentially explosive content addition, yet not a single one posted about it once the NDA was lifted.

There was not any magic behind it, it was straight pet dying. Same as you could with a dye tub on test center except the number of colors were restricted. You were shown a Dragon, Giant Beetle and Llama to base your judgment on. Besides Trammel, the most repeated put down I think there is for UO is the bright colors. It is often mentioned in discussions I see in various forums.

I was opposed to this. Having a dozen different color Dragons is going to just look terrible. Then there are the ~80 other creatures in the game you will get to dye. I can imagine a Harrower with 9 different color Greater Dragons on it and it is just horrid.

Apparently I was not alone in this assessment. A seemingly crushing amount of people were opposed to this. Yet the developers claimed that only 40% were opposed. Do you really want to tick off 40% of your player base over something that is just pet dyes? I think the other 60% will get along just fine without pink Dragons.

I posted earlier today that the developers should consider shelving this addition. It was detracting focus from the expansion which is just over a week away. Do they really want to tie such a blemish to their first expansion in literally 3 years? A little while later it was announced that they were doing just that. They are also going to consider doing more than just adding dye tubs for pets.