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The Perfect Ten: Absolutely ridiculous cash shop selections
This past week, the Money Gnomes at Turbine tested the waters with the idea of selling a $50 horse in Lord of the Rings Online. Oh, not just any horse, mind you: It's a toy hobby horse. For $50. The representative who asked for feedback on the item and price-point probably caused herself internal hemorrhaging by stating, "This is not a joke." The fans responded, "Of course, and the sky is made out of blue cheese." At the very least, it allowed the more creative players to come up with humorous expressions of incredulity. The fun finally came to an end when the studio announced that the "experimental" price point was a failure. Of course, this is by far not the first time a game studio's attempted to sell a ridiculous item, an item with a ridiculous price point, or both combined. If you sell it, after all, the rubes will come. So in the spirit of a $50 hobby horse that costs something like $20 in real life to acquire, here are 10 completely ridiculous items that we've seen in MMO cash shops.
The Daily Grind: What's the worst thing a cash shop can try to sell you?
MMO gamers, including our commenters and even some of our own writers, are in an uproar over the terms of Star Wars: The Old Republic's upcoming free-to-play transition. The game's F2P matrix seems to be hitting all the industry low points: lottery tickets, combat-affecting items, travel buffs, content caps, storage. Perhaps the worst of all is the quickbar unlocks. That's right -- if you want to play sublessly, you'll even have to pay to unlock extra hotkey bars. I've certainly played free-to-play MMOs that didn't try to milk me dry or annoy me into a subscription, so I know it's possible to design a hybrid pay model that doesn't generate the community's ire. Still, most every cash shop features at least one thing that gets under my skin. So today we're wondering, what's that one thing for you -- what's the worst thing a cash shop can try to sell you? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Twitter for iPhone updated, QuickBar is dead
The Twitter for iPhone app has been updated (again), and this time the company has included the change everyone's been waiting for: the QuickBar, which featured trending terms along with some paid placement phrases, has been removed from the app. Twitter deftly sidesteps the actual reason why the bar was removed, but their reasoning basically lands on the idea that the bar didn't "improve the user experience" or serve the mission of connecting people to trends on the service. Whatever the reasons, the QuickBar is gone, despite what Twitter says are "incredibly high usage metrics," so the voice of the crowd wins this round. Twitter says it will continue to experiment boldly, however, so it's unlikely that the trending topics are going to be gone for good. Still, after all of the fervor around this particular feature, it is nice to see that the company is taking public outcry into consideration. Those against the QuickBar (who gave it all of its silly monikers) will be happy to hear about the update.
The Road to Mordor: Pippin's top five plugins
This past week in LotRO's been a bit like riding river rapids: There's been a lot of rapid ups-and-downs, violent lurches to avoid dangerous objects, and a whole lot of noise that's drowning out the calmer waters ahead. For every piece of good news and positive word-of-mouth, there's been a lot of unfortunate bumps, such as server queues, dynamic layers, mouthy trolls and Codemaster's launch delay. However, I believe it's all going to settle down in a couple more weeks, and LotRO will emerge the better for it. So if this is your first week in Lord of the Rings Online, welcome! Find a great kinship, take time to smell the flowers, and hunt some orc for me. Today I'd like to take a look at one of the unsung heroes of the recent content patch -- the ability to create and use plugins (also called mods and addons) to enhance your user interface. While the system is still in beta and has a rough-around-the-edges feel to it, it's already shown great potential, particularly though the creativity that mod designers are pouring into it. While there are only a small number of plugins available as of right now and Turbine has yet to expand the scope of these Lua scripts beyond constrained limits, it's not too early to beef up your UI with these spiffy additions. Read on, free peoples of Middle-internet!
