The Daily Recap
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Under The Hood: New Beginnings Part of any MMO is starting from scratch. Whether you just started a new MMO, or a new character, the first few hours playing can determine whether or not you want to keep playing that game or character. So why is it that most MMOs have a lack of early game content? |
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Are tolls the cure for mudflation? A couple weeks ago we introduced Steve Williams' notion of mudflation, its causes, and a general framework for its eradication. On Friday, he posted part two of his three part economic plan, suggesting that the best way to remove currency from the player economy was to replace large money sinks like item repairs with frequent, small, invisible tolls ... |
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Making/Money: Flawed by Design In the last column, we discussed value chains and how, in World of Warcraft, they work when dealing with NPCs but not the auction house. Today we are looking at another game and how it deals with value chains to ensure that they do not work when crafting by NPC purchases/sales alone. |
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Design an EVE Online billboard, win big isk EVE Stratics is running a contest where winners receive free game time in EVE Online. EVE Stratics asks, "If you could place an ad on an ingame billboard, what would you put?" At first glance, especially since this was announced on the official EVE Online website, you'd think that the contest would actually allow the winner(s) to put their own messages on in-game billboards. Sadly, this is not the case. |
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The unaddressed impediments to console MMOs It's a question we often ask ourselves, particularly when games like Grand Theft Auto IV sell over 3 million copies inside of a month: what's stopping developers from bringing more MMOs to the console space? If you ask the console makers, they'll say that the opportunities are there for the taking. They're stable platforms, uniformly online-enabled, and they have captive audiences in the tens of millions. So what's the problem? |