Last week, Nintendo denied it was working on a DS redesign…72 hours before it announced it was working on a DS redesign. Electronic Arts has been doing a similar publicity pas-de-deux about the " next-generation entertainment product" its BioWare studio announced last October. Despite rumors pegging the project as being a massively multiplayer online role-playing sequel to its acclaimed RPG Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, BioWare kept its wall of silence clamped firmly down for over a year. Speaking with GameSpot after the EA buyout, studio co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuck deflected questions about the game in development at their new-ish Austin studio. "We haven't revealed any details about the game," said Muzyka. "It's super secret right now." That secrecy evaporated this past July, when EA CEO John Riccitiello casually revealed that, yes, a KOTOR MMORPG was in the works. Since then though, details on the project, which other EA executives still refuse to speak of, have been non existent, with its platforms, price, and exact launch date still unknown. "Lucas Arts and BioWare invite you to attend the official unveiling of the game that's been rumored about for years," reads the invite before providing event locale details. The gathering will be held in San Francisco the afternoon of October 21, just over a month after the release of the latest Star Wars game, The Force Unleashed. At a presentation at the Game Developers Conference this past March, producer Hayden Blackman said the fast-selling game was a replacement for a proposed third single-player KOTOR title.

LOL WUT...

Leyeron bien, se trata de un MMO basado en el universo de Cartoon Network... es justo lo que nos hacía falta (BTW, sarcasmo).

"Fusion Fail" "Fusion Fall" es el nombre que tendrá y 2009 el año en el que verá los lulz la luz, sin emabargo no todo parece ser "tan malo", ya que Bleedman es el encargado del arte del juego y para los que no lo conozcan, es el creador de una serie de web comics spinoffs basados en personajes de Cartoon Network, pero estilo anime, de los cuales, dos de sus más famosas creaciones son "The Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi"  y "Grim Tales from Down Below".

Y bueno... si a "alguien" le interesa ver el trailer, está en la fuente.

Fuente: FusionFall.com

The Instance! Podcast #122 -- (if you want to get right to the WAR-related part, skip to about 52 minutes in) -- Baseball great and 38 Studios founder, Curt Schilling, says he's burned out on raiding in WOW and moved to WAR, but leaves the door open for going back.  He talks a lot about the "massive potential" WAR has but says that "potential" doesn't necessarily equal a great game.  He's digging the RvR, but is concerned that no MMO seems to be able to compete with WOW in terms of its "polish."  He argues that, while no MMO launch has ever been problem free, players are increasingly unwilling to wait for MMOs to fix launch issues and grow into their potential -- especially with a polished alternative readily available.

Patrick Beja ("Patrick from France" who also does the great "How I WoW" podcast) also played WAR but never clicked with the game.  He pins his disinterest in playing on his PVE focus.

World of Warcast Podcast #70 - (WAR-related content begins around 5 minutes in) -- Starman is positive about some of the game mechanics like public quests and Tome of Knowledge but has an equal number of complaints about slow combat, lagging opponents, and how a player's gear all looks similar.  His biggest gripe: "nobody talks" in chat channels, which he feels limits new players ability to get answers to questions, find groups, etc.,  and makes him feel like he's playing a solo game. 

Starman also had issues with finding groups easily, and I got a chuckle out of co-host Renata's immediately negative response to the idea of WAR's open grouping where players can invite themselves into a group.  [Note: I think this is a perfect example of Mythic's challenge to re-educate incoming WOW players about how open grouping works in WAR -- it isn't obvious that WAR's grouping mechanics and rewards are exactly the opposite of those in WOW (ie, you're rewarded for grouping in WAR and can complete "kill/collect X mobs/items" quests faster rather than slower when grouped), and you can always see your quest objectives and what open groups are right nearby].

I was going to say that I hate all this gold selling spam, but requiring me to constantly interrupt my playtime to manually fill out a detailed complaint form is not a player-friendly solution.

I was going to say that even though I feel guilty for not helping, filling out these forms is actually more intrusive than the spam I'd like to help get rid of and I'm not going to do it.

I was going to say that, at least from chat, there should be a one-click option to report gold selling spam.  Other MMOs have used that approach and it's proved very successful.  A fast, simple solution is bound to increase player incentive to assist in tossing these annoying gold sellers.

I was going to write all this, but Pete at Dragonchasers.com already did a much better job.

1. The Server is too empty, so there is no world RvR to speak of, Scenario's rarely occur and PvE grinding is getting dull, quickly.
2. The Server is too full, there are queues all day every day, making players wait for up to an hour just to get on at 3am!
3. The Server is just right. (Rarely happens!)

So, why will free character transfers make this all go away? The people on the high pop realms that can't stand queuing will move off, leaving room for the people that are prepared to queue to get into a "busy" game environment.

The people of low pop realms will move to higher populated realms, causing some servers to be emptied (and thus can be taken offline) and their bandwidth/resources put to good use elsewhere (say... splitting each Tiers pairing between the two on the full/full servers?)

Most of all, it gives the players CHOICE. IF they are whining because they have to queue, they can move. If they are moaning because their server is empty, they can move. People will have no leg to stand on in terms of server population. Case closed.

I *did* run around the world 6 times, flew around it a further 9 times, and I hate the Marshes of Madness even before I'm of a level to get lost in them (having already got lost in them). I also played at least 137 scenarios, most of which were Mourkain Temple, did and turned in a bunch'o'quests, upgraded my gear (amazing what a pointy new sword & bow can do for SW survivability!), screamed with laughter at my utterly insane guildies in Vent and on guild chat, and got 2 more levels as well as a couple of realm ranks. Ysh is now R16/RR12 or so. Yay me.

I think the disconnect came from being plucked from the world and what I was doing therein whenever a scenario popped, which was often, and then dropped back into the world after them. Every time I felt like Jane Fonda waking up in The Morning After -- where am I? who am I? why does this troll have a kitchen knife in its chest? why am I in bed with a troll?!

I may start limiting myself to 1 or 2 scenarios an hour on days when I also want to get other stuff done, or want to just stand around for a bit admiring the warts on the trolls. On the bright side, I'm Order (see what I did there?), so scenarios pop and they pop often. I have the luxury of saying "Not tonight, Josephine."

Speaking of Mourkain Temple, you need to read this. It is funny. Who knows, it may teach you something.

I really want to give this game a try, but as of yet I have not.  Has anyone out there played it that can tell me their thoughts?

I believe this image from reader Milinz says it all.

Oh yeah, and it looks like we may see the KOTOR MMO this month. No big.

I just realised, when Ysharros the Shadow Warrior hit R14 yesterday, that ... *cough* ... she's my highest level ever WAR character. You can't count the beta template R31 chars, they came out of the box that level.  I got a Disciple into the teens at some point in beta, but the wipes were coming thick and fast that that point and I'm pretty sure Chryse only made it to 13.

Of course, as Dragonchasers* rightly pointed out, if you add up my Averheim alts I'm level 59. Wow, that's higher than I expected; and no, that's not 10 alts all at level 5.9 -- I only have 7 chars right now, thank you very much. So nerh.

I did put in a few smallish playsessions with the alts this week -- lower level characters are much easier to drop in on if your playtime is limited, I find. For one, you don't have to run nearly as far between quests at lower level, and for another there's the familiarity with the content that means you can zip about pretty quickly getting some minor things done. So Amariel and Ysh are 13 and 14 respectively (if not respectably), a quartet of the others are 7, and my lil Ironbreaker Meabh lags behind at 4.

I've become accustomed to reining in my leveling, too, since Mort and I usually try to play together. The couple that plays together, stays together... yeah... maybe it wasn't MMOs they meant. Anyway, he has a lot less -- a lot less -- playtime than I have, especially since he doesn't have the benefit of working from home. At least I don't have to commute back to my game machine! We tend to make the alts more or less at the same time, and more or less pair them up so that they more or less match in levels; which means right now I'm trying really hard not to play some of the characters I'd love to play. I'll give in eventually, which will cause duo problems of its own.

In the meantime, I guess I'll either concentrate on Ysh the Shadow Warrior... or go play alts on another server. Have char slots, will travel.

* No link for you! Hit the site and hit the blogroll. It's not there to ease my bunions, ya know!

Thats what happens if I try to log in with my Konami ID, which is what it asks for right? And this is what happens when I try the Game ID, just to see if it will work.

I get a different error code.... So what I want to know is, why can't I log in??!!??

Now when I switch back to my main (lvl 20) I find her lost in an empty world. T2 just seems to have died, there's nobody around, no scenario's opening, no PQ groups, nothing. This is kinda worrying me, as me and my friend are about to embark into T2 for the first time for him and im going to have a hard time convincing him it's "awesome" if this continues! I think Mythic need to get those free character transfers sorted, and FAST. Because right now, I would rather queue for an HOUR to get on to a busy server, knowing that there will be PQ groups, Scenario's happenening and RvR going on then spend another minute doing PvE alone non-stop.

What do you think? Poor server choice on my part picking "new" SE Headstart Servers rather than the existing SE/CE Headstart servers? Is all the action in T3?

Before beginning this post, we have a number of important announcements to make:

• It is currently October.
• Sandwiches, when prepared correctly, are delicious.
• Salt is salty.
• There are five items in this list.
• You are currently reading Last Shepard Games.

What's that? You're not sure why we're announcing things you already know? Perhaps you'll be equally flabbergasted by a rumor that LucasArts and Bioware will likely soon reveal the Knights of the Old Republic MMO that EA CEO John Riccitiello already totally confirmed. The rumor originates from a blurb in UK newspaper Daily Star, the author of which claims he's coming stateside to check the title out at LucasArts HQ. If the author is on the level, we certainly expect one of the two developers to "reveal" the title before his article goes to print. Perhaps they can still surprise the eleven people on the planet that don't already know about it.

Part 1: Why They Do What They Do
Part 2: Flows of Currency

While there are many MMO games out there is the of course just as many ways the economy could be designed. While some economies are strong it might not promote newer players to continue playing while others do but in the end they quite sooner because the economy is not very stable or is designed poorly. The flow of the currency is everything and you also have to keep in mind that a player might not work in the way that you would expect. One of the harder parts is designing it so that if a player quite with a huge amount of cash you don't have that money stuck. But then if you create that much amount of money and then the players decides to become active again you have just created an extreme amount of extra cash. Some methods that appear to work for a while include a faucet-and-drain but then in the end there is always something that is out of place or it makes it extremely hard to update without disrupting the balance of it. Then you have the a more realistic type called the macroeconomy which is essentially like the real world economy but has still some major setbacks that are extremely difficult to work out.

Faucet and Drain

The best way to describe this is that you have a player kill a monster. Then that monster dies and gives that player loot. That loot then is part of the player's owned things. That player then can spend this on many different things but ultimately goes down in the drain when the player buys something from an NPC, breaks it, or a number of other things.

The idea behind this is that it prevents the people that were hoarding cash or items can be overlooked and it doesn't hurt the economy as much when this occurs. RuneScape uses this style and it proves to be very effective and long lasting. On the downside you have people that can easily spend their money to effect prices of numerous items. While the Grand Exchange in this case can make it extremely hard for one person to do it, it's not that hard for several players to decide together that they want to inflate the price and in result you have other innocent players that can do nothing about it. In the end you have the inflators even more rich and able to influence more of the economy. While they cannot inflate a price for a very long time it still can be done. The more people what have that are active in the economy the harder it is for them to change it as well. So the larger the better. 

The same downside could also turn into an upside since they can prevent an item from dropping below the average during tough times. Some of these merchants even have limited out the money you can get so they sit there and collect many of the same things to continue to build of their wealth. If it wasn't for this many of the prices would be a lot lower and the economy would be a lot different. This is acting as another drain from the economy and keeping everything in check.

This would be considered hoarding of course but not so much as the negative sense as the positive. With hoarding you can have healthy inflation of the economy. Inflation isn't all that bad like everyone makes it out to be but a small amount is very healthy. The reason why a small amount is healthy is because the people that do have items have their bank value increasing therefore when they sell the item you get more of another item but if they overall increase as the same amount you can just think of this as something indifferent. BUT you have more people having more money on an average. This could be caused of many things and as the fact that a players' goal is really to make money in the game and advance forward. 

Inevitably you will have many players that are extremely rich  and low to no players that are poor or will be poor for long. The faucet and drain method will last as long as players that have hoarded a good sum of the in-game currency quit or become significantly inactive. If all of the rich players continue to get richer the resulting value of items will continue to climb to the point that it becomes very hard for newer players to join the ranks. It basically comes down to when you start playing the game and how hard you worked at making money.

But of course there is always an exception to the obvious and that is if a consistent amount of newer players come into the game there will be no issues what-so-ever.  How that is handled is by the fact that the prices will stay lower because you have the majority of players who need to buy these items and  they outnumber the very rich merchants and since they want to make money they will sell at prices that others can afford. This will make inflation harder to occur but then this would throw out the window the idea that inflation is always healthy when it's increasing. Having deflation is very healthy and keeps everything from getting too expensive and at the same time makes it easier for newer members to join in on the game and start from ground zero.

This appears to happen almost once or twice a year (depending on what part of the economy you are talking about) and a lot of people freak out and think that the economy is going to crash. Obviously it will not just because you have all these people out there that want to hoard (unintentionally or intentionally) and would buy up the items when they drop so much. But then again people are hoarding so they don't want to loose their money. In result, they sell their item as the value drops at an alarming rate. Since in RuneScape they have a limit (not they just increased it so it might occur faster in the future) of a particular percentage. Since the item value cannot drop 50% in a few hours or even minutes it will take a very long time for the economy to crash and is even makes it more unlikely that it will crash because of this. It will give the majority of active merchants to see that the value of the item dropped a lot and can reach out an buy that much more. 

If RuneScape's economy were to crash are become so hard much harder for new members to get into the game, it would have to take several years and most likely little to no growth. That is even throwing in that all the very rich players do not quit as well. So this makes it very hard for the economy to crash. I'm not sure what the state of RuneScape Classic's economy is in since I cannot go into that older version of the game but that would be the perfect example to explain what would happen if you had nothing but a whole lot of players together that played over several years and no new members came in. From what I understand, hoarding develops into a player just wanting to have a fun time and hanging out with other players.

Macroeconomy

This is pretty much an economy that basis itself on our own real world economy but in a way that is extremely smaller. Hence macroeconomy. There isn't really a very good example for this that I know of so I'll make up an example for this. I know there has been several attempts for this but then it turned out be the faucet and drain method. While the macroeconomy is ideally what MMOs want to shoot for; it is incredibly hard for it to be designed out right and stay right while there is updates in the game. Since the flow of money needs to go throughout the whole circle of stages you have to think about how to overcome people who will hoard or take advantage of anything that will get them an extra advantage over other people. Then you have the players that started from the beginning and have a very developed account and can easily make a large amount of money and even hoard it to slow down the whole economy or even crash it. There has been several instances where the economy was very hard for a newer player to join into the game since it is more like a survival method and you have to be average or above average to exist or even consider thriving.

When a new player joins into the game it will be very hard to make any money since you have players want to make money but there is only a limited amount. And because there is a limited amount of money you have to have a limited amount of resources. Figuring out how much 'stuff' you should have available in the game is almost impossible since you will not know your growth of the economy. You could of course control how much flows into the game based on how much flows out. Then you create it where a certain percent extra can go in based upon several variables that you set. It would help promote a little inflation but then again it falls into the faucet and drain economy.

So how will you get this extra money without creating something from nothing? Well you could have it where the players can either make up their own currency like how it was during Medieval times. You sat there and anyone could sit there and make up any currency they want but the value of that currency was based on what it was made up of and how much demand there was for that currency. So if average Joe made his currency and made millions of copies of that currency that value would very based mainly on what that money was made up of, but if you have a very famous important king make up the currency and distribute it as someone does work for him so they could buy services from him at a later time. Then it turns out a little different. Then people have to work for that currency and people want that currency because other people have it and then it turns out be develop into a full fledged economy.

Of course you will have several of these such currencies start out in the beginning and then you will have major competitions for it and it will turn out extremely difficult for some game code it figure out the value of each currency. So you have to have players determine this themselves. This in a sense would make it harder for newer players because you could easily have someone create their own currency that really has no value and scam the newer player into thinking that that currency is worth a lot more then it really is.

So far we just created a big lob of a mess where people can create their own currencies and it isn't really governed. Along with that we probably have given rise to several scamming methods since you always have at least some players that do not want to be trustworthy or follow by honest business techniques. So what next? You set the requirements for people to have the skills even to make money. Ha, now we have to have it where the person has to gain skills before even starting this. Then you add in more like requiring that a certain amount of people having to be in your group, guild, or whatever you want to call it in you game. This makes it where at least a group of people have to be supporting this currency. Of course you can easily use someone else's currency and not even make your own. But regardless the option will be there. How high you make these requirements is completely up to the developer but you want to hit that sweet spot where the majority is happy about it.

Now that we have our currency portion figured out you will simply look at what types of resources you want to provide in your game. I highly recommend a very large range like we have in today's world. For instance we have dozens of metals and then we can even combine certain metals or other resources to make a increasing complex items such as a screw driver to a car. Both are tools but you need a screw driver to make a car and maybe you need a car to carry your goods to other places.

NPCs would be kept to a very low since you want you whole environment and economy be interacting with each other. If it were at all possible, you would want to make it where real players would have to sit there long hours at a bank serving as the person who withdraws and gives the person money. This would take some serious coding to figure out but then again you want to try and remove as much of the NPCs interactive with players. You don't want NPCs filling in the gap for hard work. With that in mind you would continue to do this with everything you can. At first you will have to make it where NPCs are in since your game will start slow at first and you want your first players to get a reasonable boost to step in the place of those NPCs.

Now lets take a step back, why would people want to play a game that makes work similar to everyday life? So really you can throw all of this out of the window, everything. This type of economy has not yet fully hit the board and we don't have ways of making this really possible. This is one of the main reasons that isn't to possible, especially when trying to pick this economy up from nothing and then making is last very long. Eventually you will be recycling everything several times and if you didn't create enough from the beginning players will have an extremely hard time getting even the basic items.

Comparing this to the real world everything is already created but there is so much that the human race will never use it all. I'm not talking about just Earth but if we ever reach to the point of traveling to space we will have thousands of times more resources to make goods from. So now lets go back. Maybe we can pull it off. We just need to have updates were there becomes technology that becomes available in the game where you can get more resources. Of course this will lead to things getting more expensive and the cycle becomes never ending, just like the real world.

The main idea is that we cannot create this type of economy until we have mastered our own. Yes, I have though a lot more about this and I didn't scratch the surface of developing an MMOs economy but if we were to create a perfect economy in a MMO why not the real world? Problem pop up everywhere and it just comes down to that you need everyone on the same page and working together in a Jesus Imaged environment. (Read the Christian Bible's New Testament and you'll figure it out from there.)

Real World Worth Economy

This is very similar to the macroeconomy but it really isn't. This combines both the faucet and drain method at a lot different scale and ties it into the real world economy. There is only a few MMOs that do this and it really affects the decisions that people do with their character. It is very hard to start of without putting money into your character and you loose a lot of that money trying to train your character up to even make money. Then on top of that you have other people doing the same thing so getting above the average gap gets harder and harder to stay on. It turns out that the players that started in the beginning have an easier time making money and in some rare cases make enough money in the game that they don't have to hold a job in the real world and just play this game full time. This then puts them up higher above the average range and they make even more money.

To even get there you will have to probably spend thousands of dollars or even more in some cases. A lot of people that play these games don't really pay the game so much as they can make money but to have fun. The overall social scale on this type of this economy is so drastically different people don't want to hoard as much as wanting to have a lot of fun. Some people might spend twenty bucks a  month or just spend at little as possible a month or even thousand a month if they can afford it.

So far I see that all of the games that use this type of economy I don't see any issues with the actual economy other then if majority of players loose interest your whole game dies, very fast. Oddly enough this hasn't happened. I don't know why but that is something for you to figure out.

br3ntbr0 of Wall of Text fame has lost his blog! Send happy intarwebs thoughts and prayery things. I am praying especially hard because his site was a good 50% of my incoming traffic. Oh yeah, and the content was pretty good too. ;) -- Ooo, as of this writing, the formatting has been restored from the default blogger stuff, so maybe he's on his way to getting his blog back. Fingers crossed for ya, br3ntbr0!

Fame, fame at last!

I've been asked to contribute to Hammer of War Online, along with several other members of the CoW herd and blog luminaries far brighter than I. I am immensely flattered. I am also quietly peeing my pants in terror. Blathering on a blog is one thing - doing it for semi-real? Gah! I did submit the first article this morning though. I am going to be an authority on Itemisation in WAR! -- yeah, that's a lie. You'll just have to read it and see. It comes out... sometime next week I guess? I'll keep ya posted.

Work ate my free time

I'm perverse. When I have work to do, I REALLY want to play. When I have hours of free time ahead of me, I bimble around the house doing odd chores and thinking I should log on. It's not that I'm not enjoying WAR -- au contraire, mon frère, maybe I'm enjoying WAR too much. I don't want to get MMO-addicted again; you know, the one where you forget to eat, sleep, and seriously consider buying a catheter.

Also, watching everyone level around me and being usually the lowest level person on in the guild is making me strangely prickly. I don't WANT to have to level fast, and I don't like the self-imposed pressure to do so. So... I'm taking things deliberately (you might say "contrary" but I won't) slowly and not always logging in when I want to. I have no beef with anyone else's levelling pace, but I don't want to get dragged along in the wake.

In any case I have a crapton (metric, I'm French you know) of work to do, so while I have time to rabbit about nothing here, I don't have time to log on and do anything in game. C'est la vie, cherie.

It all started June of last year (2007). I'd dabbled in WoW previously, but never got hooked by it. In fact, I'd got bored of it. I reached level 63 and dropped it. Me and a friend were on the look out for something new. He suggested LOTRO. I was unsure. I love the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, for that matter, both for the books and the films. But that's a different story. Back to LOTRO. Eventually, my friend persuaded me to play. I made an Elven Hunter, him a Lore-Master. My first thoughts - this game is beautiful.

We levelled up, pretty steadily over the new couple weeks. It was truly amazing, so much fun. It took all the good stuff from WoW, and added it with a load of neat new features. It was great fun. Soon we hit 50. The leaders of my guild got bored of the game, and I found myself leader. All good fun, at the time. We were fairly well populated, and under my fresh leadership, people seemed reinvigorated and refreshed. I was running almost daily events, whether that be instance runs or social events. Soon we were raiding as well. After a couple raids however, some of the less serious players dropped out. I managed to get a very successful raiding partnership going between some of my kinship's players and those from another kinship. After a week or so of the new arrangement, we felled the Balrog! This was several weeks after the first kinship on the server got it down, but at the time it was an achievement nonetheless. I'd have to say that the moment when the Balrog first went down, I was pumped full of adrenalin in a way that I've never felt before or since in games.

Sadly, that was where it started going downhill. Now, because of the masses of fun I'd had in this game, I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay. Yet, patch after patch, Turbine were adding stupid, meaningless features to the game. No meaningful content was coming in. Eventually, I cancelled my subscription. That was around May of this year. Around the same time, however, Mines of Moria was announced. Now, that did excite me.  Mines of Moria is a quality looking expansion, for a game I've thoroughly enjoyed. And the chances are, yes, I'll go back to LOTRO when the expansion comes out. Maybe, I'll even purchase a lifetime subscription.

Tentokrát sa však rozšírila potvrdzujúca správa o exkluzívnej reportáži zo strany britských novín The Daily Star, ktorá sa objavila v samotnej hernej rubrike autora. Ten sa má vraj už tento mesiac dozvedieť prvé informácie o titule v San Franciscom štúdiu BioWaru, ktoré vraj pilne pracuje na onlinovke Knights of the Old Republic.

MMO žáner sa dočká cesty do ďalekej galaxie podľa úsudku objaví niekedy koncom roku 2009, pravdepodobne exkluzívne pre PC, avšak možnosť vydania úspešného MMO titulu pre konzoly je stále otvorená (viď Age of Conan a APB).

Okolo masívnych online svetov sa v poslednej dobe dejú zaujimavé udalosti. Do oka mi padlo najmä zrušenie MMO zo sveta Halo, Warhammer Age of Reckoning mal docela hladký štart (ak nepočítame problémy v Bete), Stargate Worlds sa už 15. októbra dočká beta testu (prihláška) a All Points Bulletin (APB) sa blíži do fázy neverejnej Bety pre priateľov a rodinu zamestnancov Realtime Worlds. Podobne to vyzerá aj s MMO titulom The Agency od SOE, ktorý stále rozmýšľa nad možnosťou skúšky serverov medzi platformami, teda PC a PS3.

Part 1: Why They Do What They Do
Part 2: Flows of Currency

This is a fairly long post but this is mainly my personal discussion in by head to understand why companies do what they do for their MMO. While I have not been apart of any other MMO as long as RuneScape I know I have little experience in these other MMOs but who does when it comes to comparing and contrasting each one.

Grand Exchange: RuneScape

While Jagex is showing new ways of creating and controlling MMO economies and providing unique ways of handling the ever present real life trading issues, there is little to no other companies looking towards Jagex and seeing what they did and why they did it or even how they did it. If you look at Jagex's game RuneScape, you see methods of preventing real life trading and scamming that are so effective they almost completely stop users to falling victim to this or cheating in these methods. I do agree that players had to give up a lot of what they were used to for something that is questionably better and usually worse for certain types of players who used the old way of trading and how the economy worked to make a lot of money.

The most difficult concept of these new methods which make items have a certain value based on the economy and that the value cannot be traded five percent greater or less then that value so difficult is that players are so used to having a completely free marketing style where the players get to choose their item value and can sell it for as much or little as they want. Now players much stick to a certain value range that is based upon the Grand Exchange, a central place of trading throughout all RuneScape worlds instantly. While this provides a way for players to trade a lot easier and more effectively it removes a lot of aspects that used to be present in RuneScape.

Simply interacting with players while trading is significantly reduced. I know that Jagex promotes the interaction with players but the simply removed the need for players to interact with players. This doesn't make sense to what they advertise but regardless it saves time for doing some else: maybe interacting with other players doing something other then trading?

Also, you have very very limited range of the values you can sell your item at. When the value of the item is below so far you can only trade it in a very short range but while it is up in a very high value you have a pretty nice range to choose from. Then again a value can only go so low before it cannot drop anymore because you cannot have it where shops buy items for more then you trade them to other people because you want to promote trading with others more then NPCs. Then yet again, they increased the competition of the shops and many of the items that are rendered useless to more experienced players are very unlikely to be bought. It used to be where low level armors such as iron, bronze, and steel used to be used a lot by players as well as bought and sold. Now you have only the very top range of items being used and if you need lower level armors you either make them yourself or buy it from a shop that is ripping you off to begin with. The main point here is that the economy isn't balanced and this change doesn't do anything about it but rather makes it more annoying to try and sell one or more items for several months because almost no one wants or even needs that item.

Time is one of the most beneficial aspects of the Grand Exchange and no doubt creates a scamless environment on its own. You simply put in the item name or at least part of it and set the price you want to buy or sell it. You have not idea who got your item or where it came from. On the downside this eliminates the need to create a small guild, clan, business, or group that has people that work together to benefit in the end. Now you have people that simply do their job independent and buy or sell whatever they need on the Grand Exchange.

Merchanting is one of the trivial things. Some people hate it and some people love it. I personally love it but that doesn't mean that we got everything when the Grand Exchange came out. My closest/oldest friend simply puts it that merchanting changed from where you could do it on a small scale to a very large scale similar to a silent auction. What that means is there is no repeditative typing or having to switch around on multiply words to buy and sell your goods. The Grand Exchange has officially made merchanting a rich sport that puts you in the billions easily and many people I have watched that use it now own so much money they are forced into buying items instead of just collecting money. Essentially making money to the point where it's just useless to collect.

Scamming is almost completely reduced to nothing, there is no doubt about that. And on top of that you have zero to little macroing now occurring in the game. Overall this will improve game performance on their server side because you have less 'people' using the same server. On top of that you have more space for people to spread out and makes it easier to get on worlds that were usually full because of so many macroers taking up the space. This is also probably one of the main reasons that they didn't have to add more worlds to the game and why people believe (sadly) that RuneScape has reduced in the amount of members and free players.

Change is hard and I admit that I didn't like the Grand Exchange update and couldn't believe that Jagex would do such a thing to its players. Jagex has mentioned that they were doing this update and have been planning to do this update for a very long time. Now that the update has been out for some time I do like the update but now find myself bored at the game since there isn't anything that makes you jump up and go "wow I didn't expect that". I had the gut feeling that this would be one of the only ways for Jagex to fix these main issues in the game but I never thought that Jagex had the guts to do that. The change was staggering and a lot of players hated that change but regardless Jagex stood up for an issue they knew they had to fix.

I can see that players a few years from now that have no idea about this update think that the update was the best update that ever happened. That is mainly because they never experienced the game before hand or became attracted to that style.

Real Exchange - Entropia Universe

I have played this game for less then a month and studied if for at least three months so don't expect something to good here but you will see the differences and similarities just as well.

Entropia Universe is run by Mind Ark and follows a system that looks similar but is actually almost completely opposite. In a sense this game is almost the complete opposite when it comes to certain things and almost the same on others. I suggest that you check the game out if you have the time.

The first difference is that Entorpia Universe is based on a real world currency: USD. It consistently has a trade value of 10PED, which is the in-game currency, to 1USD. You can spend no money to as much as you like. Of course spending money makes your game go a lot better entrainment wise.

Since the economy is purely based on a real world currency real world trading is not really an issue. Players retain property over what they own ingame. So effectively you are in control of your stuff and you can do whatever you want with it. In-game advertising related to the game is also and you spend your money for that.

Trading can be both player to player or through an auction. The auction is similar to RuneScape's but really isn't. There are many more options compared to the Grand Exchange to the point it makes it look super simplified version. The auction has options for how long you want the auction to go for, the price, amount, the buyout price, and starting bid, and a few more. The one big factor to why people still trade person to person is mainly because there is a small fee when using the auction. Of course everyone doesn't like to pay fees so there are people that yearn to find people that want to buy what they have so they can skip the fee. Every amount helps.

Now each item has a tt value that is lower then what the actual value it. The value that is shown in the game is considered the tt value or the trade terminal value. The trade terminal sells basic items and you can sell anything to it. The tt value is the value at which the trade terminal buys the items at.

Now consider that this economy has be to extremely balanced for the company to make any money and thus you are also having really money as the value. So if the economy goes sour in the game you will have everyone removing their money from the game to get out of loosing anything. So every item does have a use and there are still many items that are not used at all or are considered scam items because newer users buy these items that you either can't repair or is a worse version to another item in the same skill level. Or it is plain impractical because it costs to much to maintain.

Scamming is a lot different in this game then RuneScape by far. You do have people that go up to you and do trade at scam you but it is not usually by swapping items or anything but simply convincing the other players that this item is really the value you say it is when your selling or even buying that time. Still I would consider this a lot lower then RuneScape since if you simply know you item value (in tt) and what some recent auction trades were, you will never get scammed into buying or selling an item over/underpricing. Knowing you items that you can use is also another aspect. So essentially you need to know the game to just simply stay away from all the scams. This isn't anything more to it from my perspective.

Now consider updates. Of course like in RuneScape there are sometimes new items or older items are used in these update to help increase the usefulness of these items. Now since there are some items that have no apparent use to them you have people investing in these items for a change to get lucky and make some big numbers. This is part of the game and that is chance.

The main reason that this have a relatively strong economy is because it is very hard to get the currency without spending money or at least investing a good amount in it. For you to make a good amount of money you have to put a lot of money into your investment and on top of that you might not get anything or loose a large amount from it. This is a lot more gambling type methods to getting money then what I call guaranteed amounts. In RuneScape there is a lot more guaranteed amounts and it is not very risky for even the methods of creating a lot of money for your character.

Business are a lot different in Entropia Universe than RuneScape. The biggest difference is that your job is your business. You are your own boss and you have to go out and find people that want your goods and services. You can't just always simply make a living (a decent one for sure) by providing yourself with everything. It is possible but it would take several years to develop your character that far and by the time you do you could have capitalized on one or two primary skills and made a lot more. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you are forced to interact with people to make any good progress in the game or you will be spending thousands developing your character. The main idea is to make as much as you can or at least break even as much as you can. If your lucky and eventually, you will start making small amounts of money and the numbers continually grow.

Massive Exchange: Word of Warcraft

I haven't played too much with World of Warcraft but I have several friends that play this game a lot. While I'm pretty much an outsider to this game I know that this game is the top MMORPG and Blizzard makes very good games. I used to play countless hours on StarCraft and Diablo. While this is the top MMORPG out there I know this is also a huge problem that may not be able to destroy the economy but is basically against the game as a whole.

World of Warcraft is considered to have the biggest gold problem for any MMO out there. There are countless topics on why there is this problem and how someone might fix it. In reality there isn't a way to total remove it without control the economy in some way. If you were to remove this I doubt that many of the players will stay unless Blizzard does it right and effectively.

I know that Blizzard is serious about this issue but I don't think they are willing to realize the full need of their community and not everyone in their community is following their rules. It doesn't mean that these are bad people or anything like that. Some of the gold miners actually have to do this to make a living. That is how bad this is but while it is that bad it is providing jobs. So you have two very different sides on the matter and even a third side.

First you have the side of Blizzard. Obviously it is a business and they want to make money and they are, a lot of it actually. But then they have set up rules and see that gold mining is taking from their profits... but is it really?

From my understanding World of Warcraft is payed monthly via fifteen bucks a month. I don't see exactly how this is cutting into their profits. If gold mining is actually creating more accounts, you have income a month. So effectively this is a good thing!

From the honest players point of view this is totally unquestionably not right. They except the rules to be followed because they follow them. Why would you believe certain morals if you didn't support and expect other people to have the same or at least similar morals. I could go on an hour about this but really, if you except one person to follow this rules, everyone should. This is called being fair,  not equal.

I have seen a few YouTube videos about World of Warcrafting gold mining and I can see their point of view a lot more. Yes, there are always the few that are taking advantage of this and are literally bad on the moral side. But for the people that work for them are people that are forced into it because they don't have any other skills or can't find a job that can pay as well. They play the game constantly and throughout the day. Some people would see this as fun but do you like doing the most boring activity in any game you can think of that long? This is usually what they are doing.

So now that we know these three points of views you can clearly see why Blizzard isn't going to completely stop this real life trading. The morals behind it are very questionable though. It mainly matters on your perspective and where your coming from. The main argument is mainly that if you except one person to follow a rule all of them should. This is no exception for the company Blizzard to turn a blind eye or do something that member might not like to stop it if it's out of workers keeping this under control.

And as I come back, I bring my verdict of WAR. The gaming world seems to be ablaze with people raving about WAR. It's the MMO of the moment, and the majority view is that it has suceeded, where Age of Conan didn't.

My verdict though? Been there, done that.

It feels "samey". Sure, they've added a few innovations, improved some jibes I had with other MMOs, but it doesn't feel new. It's kind of like when you watch a classic episode of the Simpsons that you saw a few months back. It's kind of new to you, but when it comes to the best jokes, you know the punchline before they say it. It ruins it for you, doesn't it? Nothing's the same as seeing a brand new episode. That's what WAR is like. It's so similar to other MMOs that I've played before that it's not as fun as it was the first time I experienced it in LOTRO. Does that mean that any MMO that's similar to this style, the EQ model as it were, I won't be able to enjoy? Maybe. Kind of sad, but I think I'm only indicative of the average gamer, and in the future we'll be seeing new things in MMOs. By the way, by the EQ model, I don't mean the UI, I mean the style of game. All these games have the same basic progression model, same combat style, same objectives in game.

I've got a week left of my subscription, yet I've uninstalled the game. I found no fun in the Old World.

What now? My eyes are looking firmly towards LOTRO, with the expansion coming, hopefully, next month. In the mean time, I've got myself a spot in the Football Manager Live stress test. That'll be an interesting experience - there's a game that doesn't use the EQ model. I'll certainly be buying FM2009, but depending on how I find FM Live, I might be trying a totally different game!