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The Daily Grind: Who the heck uses Raptr and Xfire?
Every month or so, we hear from Raptr and Xfire publicists that such-and-such a game is now ranked number one on that platform and 80 bajillion people total are gaming while logged into said tracking service. And at least once a week, commenters will inform us that one MMO or another is pure fail because its Raptr numbers have trailed off, which is usually followed up with a "shut up; no one uses Raptr" or something similar. I'm not saying social media is useless; I know it's a factor in predicting market penetration and even Kickstarter success. But I do have to wonder: Who the heck actually does use Raptr and Xfire? Do you? Do you know anyone who does? Is this a thing MMO players avoid because they can already spam their achievements inside games or using Twitter plugins? Do you use them to tell you how much you really play games? How useful do you think these platforms' data are in discussions about MMO numbers? 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!
The Anvil of Crom: Thanksgiving leftovers and what's new in Hyboria
What's up, Age of Conan fans? Hopefully all of you had an overindulgent Thanksgiving (I'm picturing clusters of barbarians hunched around roaring campfires, gnawing the blackened meat off the bones of whatever game animal happened to pass by). For my part, I spent the last couple of days avoiding work, gaining weight, and catching up on recent news from Funcom's Hyboria. I've been a bit distracted with various online shooters lately, but I always find myself coming back to AoC because of its unique fantasy world and rough-and-tumble themepark mechanics. Join me after the break for a few recent tidbits that piqued my interest.
Wargaming.net dangling World of Warplanes alpha tester carrots
Think you've got the right stuff to be a World of Warplanes alpha tester? Well, you may have it, but you'll also need to have a strong stomach when it comes to installing third-party apps on your computer. Wargaming.net has thrown open the application process for its upcoming World War II aviation MMO, and would-be testers will need to install both Overwolf and Xfire on their gaming rigs. A news blurb on the official World of Tanks website spills the beans, and Wargaming.net says that the aim of the test is to "discover how functional and comfortable these programs are for you." In addition to the alpha tester position, the devs are also dangling some sort of "special award" carrot. We're not sure whether it's an in-game title, ability, or other perk, but we do know that simply signing up doesn't guarantee you access to the testing phase. There's also a questionnaire that needs filling out, and "those of you who [...] provide [the] most detailed and descriptive answers will be awarded with the chance to become alpha testers [for] World of Warplanes!"
Xfire purchased by 'skill-based gaming' firm Titan
Earlier today, Xfire, creator of the gaming-centric chat/matchmaking client bearing its name, announced to its nearly 17 million registered users that it had been purchased by an unknown entity. "Xfire was bought by new owners today. Most of the team that has built Xfire over the last six years is leaving. We enjoyed working for you for the last 127 releases and wish we could stay to create the next 127. Good bye, good luck, and game on," a message from "The Xfire Team" posted on the company's website read. Following an afternoon of speculation as to the buyer's identity -- which, at one point, was listed as 3D Realms on Xfire's Wikipedia page -- it has been confirmed that Titan Gaming, a Los Angeles, Calif. based developer of "skill-based gaming" technology (i.e., competitive gaming for money), was behind the purchase. Titan will be "taking on the Xfire name, with a focus towards ongoing innovation in the gaming space," according to a message on its site, adding that, "the Xfire services will continue uninterrupted for its users" and that it intends to use the service to "help gaming companies better engage their users and monetize their games." The move appears to have been made to better position the company to compete with similar services, such as upstart Virgin Gaming. Exactly how today's events will affect Xfire's community going forward and what we can expect in terms of specific partnerships is unclear, but we've contacted Titan to find out more. [Thanks, Jevon]
Xfire offers prizes for playing Age of Conan
Xfire's latest giveaway is for Age of Conan players who are members of the Xfire AoC community. Not a member? You're welcome to join them and become eligible to participate in the Play 2 Win contest. The drawing is divided into three tiers of time so even those who don't have much time to play can get in on the action. The three categories are one hour or more, 25 hours or more, and 50 hours or more. Xfire will draw five winners at random from each tier and give away some pretty nice loot both real and virtual: headsets, mice, in-game upgrade codes, and more. Play 2 Win is going on now and lasts until May 29th, so you have plenty of time to join -- your membership is your contest entry -- and start playing to whichever tier you prefer. Check out the official rules, and good luck!
Catch Rise of the Godslayer preview on Xfire
If you've been waiting for more information or a first look into Funcom's upcoming Age of Conan expansion, Rise of the Godslayer, then you're in luck! This Thursday, April 29th at 12:00pm Pacific (3:00pm Eastern / 9:00PM CET), they're planning on holding a special preview streaming event in conjunction with Xfire to give everyone an early look into the exotic new lands of Khitai. "Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer is now very close to launch and we are very excited to share our view of the expansion with the world through Xfire," says Game Director and Executive Producer Craig Morrison. All you'll have to do to catch the preview is to point your browser at the main Xfire site at the time mentioned above, sit back, and enjoy the tour. The game's developers will be taking players along as they adventure through some of the new content, offering a chance to see lands and sights as yet unexperienced. There is also a plan to do a question and answer session after the preview as well. If you've been waffling on picking up the expansion, it sounds like a great way to figure out if it belongs on your "must pick up" list -- or to ask any questions about Age of Conan that you may have.
EVE Dominion dev tour streaming in live video at Xfire, December 17
CCP Games and Xfire have teamed up for a live video broadcast this week, a guided developer walkthrough of the Dominion expansion for EVE Online. You can tune in on December 17th at 12:00pm PDT to view the video stream on Xfire's site. The video broadcast coincides with a contest Xfire is running, details of which can also be found on the Xfire site. The prizes look good -- up to a year of EVE game time, an iPod Nano, and a Razer Naga mouse. Entering Xfire's "EVE 'til EVE" contest, which runs December 15-31, entails signing up to join their game community. UPDATE: The video broadcast is cancelled due to technical difficulties. Instead there will be a live text chat at 12:00pm PDT (20:00 GMT/UTC) with CCP Soundwave and CCP Guard. You'll need Xfire installed to follow along, with "Chatteox" added to your friends list to check it out.
What's to come in Rise of the Godslayer
Tigers, PvP, corruption, and more are coming with Age of Conan's next expansion, Rise of the Godslayer. Xfire has hosted a sneak peek live broadcast hosted by game director Craig Morrison and lead expansion designer Joel Bylos, and the two have shown off some of the inner workings of the expansion, including some of the changes and additions players will find. We here at Massively were watching closely and taking notes, so if you didn't get the chance to watch the video then no worries! As we said before, we have your back and we're ready to take you headlong into the blood and corruption of Age of Conan's expansion.
Reminder: Rise of the Godslayer preview today at 3 PM ET
It's been a few days since we announced it, so we thought we'd be a kind website and drop you a friendly reminder that you can catch a preview of Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer today on Xfire at 3 PM. Today's streaming preview will be composed entirely of features and areas from the new expansion, played by the developers themselves. The presentation will last about an hour and will be streamed entirely from the Xfire site, so no need to rapidly re-install Xfire if you're looking to watch. Just go to the page at a little before 3 PM, watch the video, and chat live with other viewers. If you can't make it, don't feel like you're missing out! We'll be putting up a synopsis of what went on in the presentation after it ends to keep you in the loop. So don't fear, we've got your backs!
Age of Conan offers streaming expansion demo Monday
If you're playing Age of Conan, the odds that you're looking forward to the upcoming Rise of the Godslayer expansion are... pretty much one to one. The news on the expansion has been fairly slow in coming since its announcement earlier this year, but it looks like we're due for a big burst of new information on Monday. Funcom has announced that the developers will be hosting a streaming demo of the game on December 7th via Xfire. The demo, hosted by game director Craig Morrison and the expansion lead designer Joel Bylos, will begin at noon PST (3 PM for those of us on the other coast). Scheduled to last for an hour, it promises to cover both the content in the demo -- which is all slated to be new material -- as well as the expansion in general, which is targeted for release in the first half of 2010. Both the developers and their hosts at Xfire are excited about the chance to show off a live demo, and odds that the game's playerbase is excited are, again, probably one in one. So clear some time to catch the broadcast on Monday, and see what's in store for Age of Conan as it journeys into the eastern empire of Khitai. [ via WarCry ]
Turbine and Xfire think you need a new computer
They want to give you one. No, really. At the beginning of last week Xfire and Turbine announced that they were teaming up to offer prizes for joining the Xfire community and playing Dungeons and Dragons Online. There's still time to get in on the contest. The requirements for entering are pretty easy: join the Dungeons and Dragons Online Official XFire Community and play DDO while signed into Xfire. The prizes are divided into four categories, and your prize category is determined by how many hours you play between now and November 2nd. Playing 50 hours puts you in the drawing for a 24-inch widescreen monitor and a new computer with a generous helping of bells and whistles or a shiny new graphics card. Playing 25 hours puts you in the prize category for a 23-inch widescreen monitor. If you're short on time, one hour of playtime will put you in a drawing for 1500 Turbine Points, and who doesn't love a virtual gift card? In all 33 people will be chosen to win, so look here for details, here for those pesky rules, and here for the Xfire DDO community. Good luck!
Still time to enter the Xfire Age of Conan video contest
Like brutality, blood, buxom babes, or bizarre stunts? How about free stuff? Now what if we told you that your deft skill with creating and recording the first in Age of Conan could get you the second? Thought that might get your interest. It turns out our friends over at Xfire are currently holding a video capture contest that offers some really excellent prizes for the players who are able to catch video of some serious Age of Conan fun! The three categories are "Best PvP", "best death (or near-death)" and "misc" which could be any crazy thing you can come up with. (Another video like the horse punting people off bridges perhaps?) While the contest started earlier this week, there's still lots of time to get an entry in and take a shot at winning some of the excellent prizes up for grabs, like the 120gb solid-state drive, the 6gig triple-channel RAM, and even lifetime subscriptions for Age of Conan! If you don't have video capture equipment, have no fear - apparently that's in the Xfire client. So if this sounds like something you'd like to take a shot at, why not head on over to the Xfire contest site and check out all the details. We're looking forward to seeing all the crazy videos people capture.
Twittering from the World of Warcraft
Just in case you needed any more Twitter in your life (I'm getting to the point where I really don't), enter the PlayXpert Twitter widget, part of the PlayXpert gaming toolset, a free Windows application that you can download to run alongside your PC games (very similar to Xfire and that type of application). It's a little bloaty if all you want to do is run Twitter alongside WoW, but unfortunately, that functionality will never be available in an addon, as addons can't interact with any other outside sites.The poor man's solution here is to just run WoW in windowed mode and have your Twitter browser or client open right next to it -- you don't need a big application if you really need to be connected at all times. But if you want to livetweet your raid without sacrificing screen space to windowed mode, PlayXpert is one way to do it. It'll even do some autotwittering for you if you want.And of course if you're on Twitter already, don't forget to follow our WoW Insider Twitter account. We've already hit our goal of over 9,000 followers (and yes, a video version of the podcast is coming soon), but we're constantly throwing out little pieces of news, discussion and even some giveaways over there, so follow us if you're interested.
Age of Conan offers chat and prizes
With the current 7-day free trial going for Age of Conan and DX10 working, eyes are starting to turn back to Funcom's brutal and bloody MMO set in Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age. If you've been on the fence about popping back in to play again, Funcom and Xfire have sweetened the deal for you with some really cool prizes for logging time in Age of Conan. You can log as little as one hour, or 50+ hours, depending on which package you'd like to take a try at. Some of the goodies up for grabs range from a free lifetime subscription to Age of Conan to cool gaming keyboards, to in-game items for your character. Added to that, Funcom are holding an upcoming chat with the Xfire community on the 10th at 5pm EDT. As an added bonus for those who are interested in attending, they're offering five lucky winners who attend the chat a copy of Age of Conan, a free one-year subscription, and a pile of in-game goodies. So if you are enjoying the updated Hyborian homelands, head over to Xfire and get registered to win some gaming goodness.
The Daily Grind: Expectations of quality?
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to participate in the Xfire Debate Club, which was really quite cool. A lot of fantastic questions were asked, but one in particular struck me as more of a community question than just a question for those of us who were in attendance from the various media/gaming companies. That question was whether or not there was more of an expectation of quality from players of subscription games than there is from free to play titles. Most of us answered that it used to be the case, but with games like Guild Wars in the market, and other strong titles coming all the time, it seemed to be less and less the case. After all, if a game isn't quality, people won't stick around, most of us reasoned. This morning, I wanted to come back and ask you, our Massively community, just what you thought about that? Do you feel that there's more of an expectation of quality in a subscription game, or do you also see free to play games moving into the quality space more and more, breaking down those expectations? Do you think that there will ever be a level playing field between subscription and F2P games? Why or why not?
Xfire free to play vs subscription MMO debate today
If you were a follower of the Xfire Debate Club before you'll be glad to hear that they're starting the Debate Club back up again, as of today. That's right, at 5pm EST / 2pm PST (22:00 GMT) today, you can join a group of MMO journalists, developers, and other industry insiders as we debate the ins and outs of free to play vs subscription models.Some of the many points that will undoubtedly come up over the course of the Xfire debate are: Free sounds good, but what are the trade-offs? Does quality or quantity matter more? Is one business model more sustainable than the other? With Free 2 Play games becoming such a driving force, where do you see MMOs going in general? I'll be there to speak as part of the Massively team, but we'll be fielding some questions from those who show up to participate as well. Among the other guests are Cody Bye from Ten Ton Hammer, Randall Price from ArenaNet, Arend Stührmann from CCP, Christian Wehrlin from Games Masters, Josh Sell from Aeria Games, Adam Mersky from Turbine, Fred White from YNK Interactive, and Tony Colafrancesco from MMO Life as special guest moderator. With such a great group of panelists to debate this with, it should prove to be an interesting and lively discussion. So be sure to grab a copy of the Xfire client if you haven't already, and come by to discuss the future of MMOs with us!
The Daily Grind: Do you use integrated voice chat?
Integrated voice chat is becoming a default feature of many newer MMOs, and it's even been retrofitted into our older games, like EverQuest II and World of Warcraft. It's like power steering on a new car; you almost can't remember a time before it was standard. Games like Dungeons and Dragons Online were among the first to offer the feature, while others soon followed suit.Personally, I find myself sticking with programs like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak to run my voice chat. Even in Lord of the Rings Online, I find myself turning off the IVC to use TeamSpeak with my kinship. So the important question here is: What do you prefer? Does integrated voice chat cause your game to lag, or any other performance problems? Do you just prefer Vent or TS (or Skype, or Xfire, etc) because you're used to it from before it became integrated? Let us know!
Xfire contest rewards you for playing Lord of the Rings Online
Xfire and Turbine are teaming up to offer a Lord of the Rings "Play 2 Win" event. Gamers playing either the full game or its demo, and who've joined the Official Xfire Lord of the Rings Online Clan, are eligible to win prizes in the contest. The time you spend logged in determines your prize eligibility, if you're selected: Gold Level Prizes (50 hours +): Ten winners each get a 6-month subscription, in-game Bree horse mount, and a LotRO t-shirt. Silver Level Prizes (15-49 hours): Ten winners each get a 3-month subscription, and a LotRO t-shirt. Bronze Level Prizes (under 15 hours): Ten winners each get a 30-day subscription. The contest runs from January 28th to February 11th. You can check out the rest of the details of The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria Play 2 Win Event on the official Xfire site.
Raptr founder Dennis Fong discusses the importance of social networking
In the world of social networks for gamers, the competition is certainly growing, Starting with sites like Xfire and branching into more feature-rich services like gamerDNA, any new gaming social networking site would certainly have its work cut out for it.During a recent interview with Obsessable, Raptr's founder Dennis Fong explains his company's vision in regards to providing more comprehensive features for social gamers. As a co-founder of Xfire, Fong understands gaming trends and the underlying social infrastructure of gamers. "We want to help people to know when their friends are playing games in realtime across multiple platforms." Fong says in the interview. "Our ultimate hope is that literally any platform that games are played on, if someone's playing on it and you're a user on that platform, then you'll know about it through Raptr." Read much more on Fong's vision with Raptr on his extensive interview with Obsessable.
Xfire's WotLK "Race to 80" contest registration extended until tomorrow
Ready! Set! Grind!The folks at Xfire have announced a 2-day extension to their "Race to 80" contest for the upcoming World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. This contest will reward the first player to hit level 80 in Blizzard's newest WoW expansion, with a high-end gaming PC as the grand prize.Haven't heard of this contest yet? Head on over to their official rules page to check out all the info you'll need and register before tomorrow for a chance at the grand prize. Not only will this be an exciting event for the contestants, but Xfire members will actually be able to watch the race, listen to the shoutcast and discuss the race in their dedicated chat rooms as it all unfolds.
