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A new reign begins on the GW Amp site today. A new herald of the Site Manager title has been chosen and his name is Wyat_Hawke.
For those unaware, outstanding staffer/member Kanna recently stepped down as Site Manager for the site. In his departure, a new SM was sought to fill in the void. Kanna will be missed as staffer but I am pretty sure he isn't completely leaving the site. I would like to be one of the first to thank him for his time and effort he placed into the site on a daily basis. Also please give congratulations to Wyat in his new position for the site.
With Wyat taking over as SM, we are considering opening up to take on new staffers. Stay tuned for news on seeking out site assistance. If anyone has any questions feel free to contact Wyat or myself.
Stay tuned to Gameamp.com for more news on Guild Wars.
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We all know that in-game Gold is sold for Real Money in a process called RMT. We know it because we get tells in-game from seller accounts and because we sometimes (think we can) see the farming accounts at work in our beloved game.
That there is a market for in-game gold can not be doubted once one looks at Google's WOW Guide WOW GOLD trend analysis. Some go as far as to compare the phenomenon to prostitution, claiming it's the unsavory elements around it that are the problem, not the "service" itself.
Game Security blogger Play no Evil got some statistics straight from the monster's mouth. IGE has been busy tearing itself to shreds so was unavailable for comparable figures.
The article is an interesting read, showing some interesting tidbits like WOW-EU gold being persistently cheaper than WOW-US Gold. Could it be that Blizzard patrols the EU servers less fanatically or is it to do with time-zones, the proverbial Chinese Farmer doesn't have to wait nearly a day for the US market to wake up before offloading the hot goods. Some of the comments are even better. Truly showing how complex and diverse this issue really is.
Read and discuss.
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Strictly speaking this isn't news, since this item is about two decades into the past and one decade into the future.
The first is a Visual Histroy of MMORPGs (first part) hosted at Massively.com which shows a nice overview of the genre, starting with the first MUD, created by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw back in 1978 (told you it was two decades) up to around the time Everquest hits the scene in 1999. Presumably, that will get a viewing in part2. But for a quick timeline of that classic, check here.
But this is all preface for Richard Bartle's (who is indeed the same Bartle as from the famous Bartle Test which many Developers still use to define players by) Keynote speech at IMGDC 2008, in which he sets out three brilliant though sometimes scary visions of how MMORPG's will evolve in the next ten years or so.
Best of all, he posted his Slides online!
I would invite you all to look at the pretty pictures by Massively and then read through Richard Bartle's Slides, if only to find out how he managed to link MMORPG's to two of the best things to come out of the seventies, namely the Muppets and Debbie Harry.
Once you're done, I'd like you to share your thoughts on the past and future of MMORPGs here.
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EA Mythic brought saddening news earlier this week when they announced a fall launch, showing once and for all that a release set in mud can still easily slip.
But since that sad day, Mythic's been making up for it with a sleuth of items that hitherto had only been hinted at. They accomplished this by means of letting a TTH crew film just about everything they had tape for during a visit to the Mythic offices.
Here's the list:
“Tech is as deep as plastic. Game play is forever!”
In another part of the world, we learn that EU Open beta this summer will be guaranteed for the 55,000 people who will be pre-ordering the Collector's Edition. The rest will presumably be drawing straws.
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Well, we've got no-one to blame for this but ourselves.
We did ask for this after all. Thanks to the valiant efforts of our Developers, you are now only a click (or two if you miss-click like me) away from seeing which of your site's staff-members are online at the moment.
For example:
So if you need a staffer, and need one NOW, that's the place to check who to PM. In emergency situations, you can also use the staff page of other network sites. You can easily navigate by means of the pull-down menu at the top right of every page. The four mentioned sites are the most active though. A link to the Staff page is always provided in the left column as part of the box labeled "Gameamp", usually at the bottom.
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There has been a recent outbreak of new strain of Private Message scams to hit the Gameamp Network. It can be from any user, but the basic message is that something tragic has happened to the user and they need your help in retrieving funds.
If you receive one of these types of PMs in your box, please notify the closest staffer and include any and all pertinent information, such as username who sent the PM, the contents of the PM, and anything else you might feel they would need to know. In order to make this scam seem more legitimate, the user will include what looks to be their real identity and email address in the body of the message. Please do not be fooled by this tactic.
The staff here at Gameamp wants you to know that this kind of behavior is severely frowned upon and will not be tolerated. We would like to keep this site as friendly and family oriented as possible and need your help in keeping it that way.
Thank you for your time and attention.
Big
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Richard Garriott's being shot too the moon though
Starr Long addresses various issues with and around Tabula Rasa's less than stellar reception.
As Videogamer reported NCSoft admits disappointment with Tabula Rasa and this led to rumors of massively Layoffs at Destination Games (DG).
Starr almost debunks this by explaining this is the normal downsizing of the team at the end of a project. Regardless the column can't negate the feeling it's damage control, but it might be good news for Tabula Rasa's stalwart fan base.
Especially for PVP Players it seems, looking at today's Feedback Friday and the fact that Richard Garriott's Scheduled Spaceflight hasn't been turned into a one-way ticket yet.
Sources:
VideoGamer -- PlayNC
RGTR -- QJ.net
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Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, according to Stephen Chenault, CEO of Troll Lord Games.
Gygax designed the original D&D game with Dave Arneson in 1974, and went on to create the Dangerous Journeys and Lejendary Adventure RPGs, as well as a number of board games. He also wrote several fantasy novels.
"I don't think I've really grokked it yet," said Mike Mearls, the lead developer of the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. "He was like the cool uncle that every gamer had. He shaped an entire generation of gamers."
Whole article at: WIRED
The father of D&D the game that spawned, well everything from P&P RPG to the MMORPG's of today.
As reported by Shepard in this thread
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| QUOTE | | "Online game giant NCsoft is to restructure its U.S. game studio in Austin, Texas, which has inflicted a massive loss to the parent company by failing in a six-year blockbuster project." |
Thus starts the rather cold article in the Korean Times, don't worry it's in English. The studio is Richard Garriott's and the blockbuster to be was Tabula Rasa.
It seems Tabula Rasa so far "only" made 5 billion won ($5.3 million) which is nu cat-pee, unless you compare it to the development cost of 100 billion won ($106 million). Ouch!
So now NCSoft is going to restructure the Studio.
Lets hope for the TR fans sticking with this game that this isn't the start of a slide like the one made by that other over-budgeted game released unfinished and too early during 2007. By which I refer to Vanguard, Saga of drama, né Heroes, which is now being kept on life-support by a skeleton crew and an intern.
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Here's a general warning for everyone to heed.
In January, Best Buy pulled their $230 Insignia 10.4-inch photo frames off the shelves, because they came pre-loaded with a virus.
Today, (well, yesterday) we learn that the trojan, called Mocmex, is able to block more than 100 types of security and anti-virus software from killing it, and bypasses the Windows firewall to download files from remote locations, spreading them randomly over your hard drive and any portable storage device you plug into your PC -- like, for example, a digital photo frame or USB stick.
So far, it's all pretty normal virus stuff, though a bit nastier than some. But here's the kicker. Apparently this cute little bug Mocmex has a payload geared towards hijacking Game accounts!. Yes siree, this baby wants your WOW accounts, your Guildwars accounts and possibly even your CoX and PotBSaccounts if it can get them. Probably because some of these are worth more than stolen credit cards to the right buyer.
Luckily, not everyone has one of these Digital Frames as they're a bit expensive really, but we all know it's the way of viri to go beyond their original place of residence. It starts on these frames but migrates and procreates as fast as tribbles if given the chance. So this really would be a good time to update that virus scanner, do a full systems scan and change your account passwords anyway.
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