Tuesday, September 11, 2012

WoW: CRZ fun.




Ah, the joys of new stuff.

TyL: Or, are Going to Learn

Free to Play (F2P) is not a cure all.

City of Heroes is currently scheduled to go dark later this year. There are many efforts underway to try and prevent this, and I won't knock them because there are a lot of people who really liked this game even if I didn't when I gave it a shot. But, I won't pretend they are likely to succeed either given that the Developers have apparently been shown the door. Although one assumes a caretaker crew is still in place to keep up the servers, spawn some insane critters in the last month/week, and then turn out the lights, I don't expect they're likely to bring an entire studio back from the dead.

City Of Heroes: Freedom - the F2P version of the game appears to have been launched Sept 27th 2011; it bought the game a little more than one year more of life. In that year, about half the press releases from the company were biweekly announcements about great things you could buy with "Paragon Points": the cash to game currency conversion.

Apparently that didn't work all that well.

There are other reasons floating around - ambivalence from ArenaNET/NCSoft towards maintaining a NA Development studio when their markets/offices are increasingly elsewhere is the prevailing one - but I'm going to go with the most obvious: CoH was an 8 year old game well into the tail end of it's player base; still beloved and in people's memories but no longer played nor paid for by many of those that flocked to it initially. Not only that, but the number of comments from people hoping they port the Character Generator to it's own engine and release that separately as a stand alone going away present still makes me wonder how many people were playing the game, and how many were simply playing Super-Hero Designer inside one of the best tools for doing it currently on the market by all accounts.

So, what we learn from this is that F2P has the potential to get people in the door and interested again but you need to be able to sustain that burst and get them to buy your perks in order for it to actually prevent your product from failing. Newer games may have greater success at that because they are the "new shiny", but they too can potentially run into problems over the long term because their continued existence is now reliant on keeping those free players entertained and shopping or enthralled enough to buy into the premium product.

Which raises the question: why do we even call this F2P? Because of the illusion that the game is now "free"? It would be easy to come up with some derogatory term for what this model actually is but that would only serve to get people combative so I'm going to skip that and just close with the following: the reality is that the game is only free to play to those that are not paying. Someone else is still paying the bills even if you are not and when there's no longer enough people willing to pay for you to be able to play, your game is still going to die.

Do enjoy the ride in the meantime though.

Sunday, September 9, 2012

WoW: Offered WIthout Comment.

Ghostcrawler: More stable slots would be fine to a point. Don't want hunters feeling like they should tame evey pet they see. Taming should be a decision. There are plenty of "collect all" achievements. Hunters aren't crazy cat hoarding ladies.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

RftP: Worst Writing Ever....

Some guildies have introduced me to Sandra Hill. She specializes in erotic fiction. I honestly don't know what scares me more; that this gets published from a mainstream publisher, or that it apparently made the NYT Best Seller list. An Excerpt:
… Her long hair, still wet from the shower, had been combed down her back in a wet swath. Hilda was sitting on the floor, her round, wet boobs still wet from the shower’s water.
I take it showers make things wet....
She dried off the water with a towel, which then became wet
... no shit...
Hilda gasped when she saw a reflection in her bedroom mirror: through the slightly open door, she caught a glimpse of the chiseled abs and square jaw of the mysterious stranger who shared her cabin. She stood and spun around, her breasts swinging heavily with the momentum.
... You know, I've yet to accidentally walk in on a naked women I wasn't dating whose first reaction was to just turn towards me and let it all hang out... Maybe I need to stumble into change rooms more often...
She grabbed the door and flung it open, revealing shirtless Torolf quivering with desire in the hallway.
... you're kidding, right?
Torolf was ashamed at being caught, but his shame made him even hotter – hotter for sex.
... Torolf is apparently related to Zapp Brannigan,
He stepped into the room, and his bulging abs accidentally smushed into Hilda’s rich chest.
From this we learn that Torolf is either 8 feet tall, or Hilda is a dwarf...
As Hilda’s buttermilk bosoms squished up against his granite abs, Torolf almost had a dick aneurysm.
A Dick Aneurysm is what you get when your idea of research is looking up Explosion in the thesaurus of MS Word.
“Hilda,” Torolf murmured thickly, his throbbing meat wand pressing against Hilda’s warm thighs. “There is a secret I need to not tell you: You are my forbidden desire.”
Hilda had been waiting to hear these words. Her heart was lifted on golden wings and soared toward a radiant sun of perfect joy. She saw herself and Torolf happy together, bathed in the golden light of love. Her snooch got all warm, too.
Hilda doesn't get complemented all that often, does she...
“Torolf,” Hilda moaned, her lush teats straining with desire. “I need you.”
Torolf, coarse abs pulsing softly in the moonlight, stood silently.
Hilda looked at him expectantly.
“Oh, sorry,” she added. “Torolf, I need you – sexually.”
... and Torolf is thick as a brick...
At hearing those beautiful words, Torolf flexed his rough-hewn abs and Hilda found herself being guided to her soft bed by the sheer force of Torolf’s undulating midsection. She parted her thighs in anticipation, exposing the soft pink petals of her clunge.
... ok... let's dissect this for a second... Tor is basically back stepping her towards the bed while she's trying to spread her legs... that... that doesn't work well...
Torolf entered her like she was a lottery.
So she's a $2 6/49 whore? $10 Scratch Ticket? $100 Charity Lottery? Somewhere in the middle?
His engorged pecker pushed inside her and she felt fulfilled with sexual fulfillment.
For all the effort she puts into finding slang for penis, you'd think she'd be able to come up with something other than two variants on "fulfilled" for that sentence.
Hilda clutched at the bedsheets with lust and ecstasy and her hands.
Thanks for clarifying that at the end; I was worried Hilda was stressing her toes...
Her spongy love mountains hurled to and fro with each pounding. Her body was like a beautiful flower that was opening and somebody was pushing their dick inside it.
Because that sounds incredibly sexy...
Then Torolf moaned, arched his back, and suffered from dick Parkinson’s.
Ok, now she's just throwing words together...
He pumped in all of his hot pearlescent sperms as Hilda spasmed with so many orgasms!
The two lay still for a moment as the stinky scent of lovemaking billowed around the room.Hilda got out of bed, still shimmering with orgasm. She glowed with contentment, like a cat who ate the cream of the crop.
The sex so hot, so heavy, so steamy, so epic that it would be over in 5 sentences.
She walked across the room and picked up her towel, still wet with shower water. “Torolf,” she said softly, “there’s something I have to tell you…”
But her bed was empty.
Torolf was gone, escaped out the bedroom window. In the distance, Hilda heard the fading sound of galloping abs.
... galloping abs? Really?

This insanity brought to you by Rough and Ready; a book whose plot - time lost Navy SEAL takes the crack team he's managed to assemble in the future back in time to 11th century Norway to avenge his family - is almost as incredulous as this writing.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

WoW: It's Been a Good Week So Far....

... and now the sword finally drops off of Eranikus.

So, doubly good week for me. Doubly bad week for Dragons.

WoW: Saving Azeroth: One Nerf at a Time....

35% Nerf. Two weeks before the next expansion. Fuck it, I don't care; the bast is dead:
Full credit to the guildies who stuck it out through thick and thin and those guilds that came before us. Long, long, before us. Hopefully the next expansion will be more productive.