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Battle and usability being improved in The Repopulation
Someone always wants to play a melee character. You could give everyone in an MMO the ability to shoot something dead from two zones over and there would be at least one player rushing into melee range to smack at it. Hence why The Repopulation has made a point of upping melee's viability by improving its ability to hit a moving target; if someone's going to do it anyway, it may as well be viable. Medical abilities have also been improved, and the game's crosshairs and aiming assistance have both received an upgrade. The other two major areas of improvement for the game's past month of development has been the addition of new content near Plymouth (including a truly massive cave network) and improvements to missions and mission templates to make the game easier to jump into. The inquiry system also allows players to collect data on the game world, and the Surveying skill allows players to figure out where harvestable resources are located. Take a look at the full patch notes for an in-depth look at how the game has changed as it moves ever closer to its beta test phase.
The Soapbox: Accessibility and customer service
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. I was originally pulled into World of Warcraft by two real-life friends of mine. They liked the game, played for a year or so, and then quit playing. They never got sucked into the world of MMOs like I did. I don't think they ever will either. It's not that they aren't gamers or that they don't fit into the culture. Maybe for their own reasons, they'd never play an MMO again... life and all that. But one interesting thing they told me makes me think they really will never play an MMO again: imperfect games. Now, besides the fact that no game -- online or off -- is perfect, there appears to me to be a great disparity in the functionality between MMOs and single-player games. It's easy to see how someone similar to me can work his way past a few speed bumps to get an MMO up and running, but what about a computer-illiterate person? Before there's even talk of bugs in the game or of the game being fun or not, there's an issue of accessibility and customer service. I want to talk about accessibility and customer service in this round of the Soapbox.
Symbian^3 web app development tools come out of beta, aim for standardized simplicity
Has the Nokia N8 made a Symbian^3 believer out of you? If so, you'll be glad to know the beta tag has been peeled off the web application development tools for the platform, which -- according to Executive Director Lee Williams -- provide "an ideal entry point" for coders of all skill levels. This is because the primary languages spoken are HTML, CSS and JavaScript, familiar to almost anyone who's tried to create for the web, and with just a little extra JavaScript exercise, you're promised access to the phone's contacts, camera, accelerometer, and location. It sounds all kinds of refreshing, but the usefulness of this tool set and the entire environment will be determined by what people produce with it -- and to that end we've provided you with a link to the downloads page (Windows, Mac and Linux users are all being served) where you can get your Symbian dev career started in earnest.
US consumers: "Give us cheap flips"
J.D. Power's 2006 U.S. Wireless Mobile Phone Evaluation Study (whew) has dropped, giving us a glimpse into the mind of the average cellphone-enabled American. What have we learned? In a nutshell, we apparently love us some cheap Sanyo clamshells. Allow us to clarify: from 2004 to 2006, the average handset purchase fell from $99 to $86. Since 2002, candybars accounted for some 70% of phones sold; that's dropped to 39% in 2006 while clamshells have skyrocketed from 7% to 58%. To a certain extent, we have the chicken-and-egg phenomenon in effect here -- flip ownership has naturally risen signifcantly as attractive models (read: RAZRs) have come on the scene. Perhaps most surprising is that dark horse Sanyo ran away with the "overall customer satisfaction" title, with LG in a distant second. Satisfaction in the "phone operation" category -- that is, ease of use -- rose a whopping 5% across the board from last year, indicating that phones are getting simpler or users are getting smarter. Either way, we're all for it, as long as it doesn't lead to more people choosing ringtones in restaurants. [Warning: PDF link]
