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Get Grumpy, Faster and cheaper than Figure Prints!
If you're like me, Greatfather Winter didn't put a golden ticket or an uber laptop in your holiday stocking. And with my luck, I'll probably never win the Figure Prints lottery, either. Sad, but that's the reality of the situation. Enter Grumpycoder with their WoW PaperIdol. While they may not offer a rl figurine, they are the first to provide (that I know of) portrait and full body pictures that auto-update the look of your character as your Armory equipment changes. What this means is you'll be able to not only keep up with every alt you've accumulated over the years, you can now show them off in their current state of progression. No more WoW blogs with outdated character picts and no more forum avatars that look like you just hit level 5. Feel free to proclaim out into the interwebs what lewts you got last night, safe in the knowledge that without lifting a finger, everyone can see exactly how bad they clash with your Beguiler Robes. We'll be giving WoW PaperIdol a test drive after the jump!
New avatars introduced for the LotRO forums
I'm sure we've all been there. Sitting around depressed, refreshing the Lord of the Rings Online forums over and over and wishing for more avatar choices. None of the 119 avatars available really capture the essence of you, do they?Well cheer up friends, as community specialist Saffron has dropped the bomb that there are now almost 100 new avatars to choose from, and there's bound to be one with your name on it. Early feedback from the fans appears overwhelmingly positive, and Saffron gives instructions on how to set your fresh new look:You can choose or change your avatar by clicking on the User CP button above and clicking on the "Edit Avatar" section on the sidebar. We all hope you enjoy with these new avatars!
Liven up Address Book with Avatars
Is your Address Book full of web-savvy friends who know what a Gravatar (or a Pavatar) is? Avatars is a freeware plugin for Address Book that searches for, displays, and adds your contacts' avatars to their cards. It installs with a package installer as a SIMBL plugin, and it looks to me like SIMBL is in the package, too, just in case you need it. It's simple, useful and has the right amount of eye candy to be visually interesting without being intrusive. Now I just need more friends with avatars.
Breakfast Topic: How many characters do you play?
Player character, character, avatar, toon... Regardless of the term you use to refer to your in-game persona, I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same thing. And today, I'm curious: how many characters do you play? If advancement is your aim, it makes a lot of sense to focus your time and energy on a single character. If efficiency is your goal, perhaps you have a pair of characters to switch between depending on rested XP or what roles your party might need filled. But if your interest is variety, perhaps you have a character of each class -- or more. For my part, I actively maintain three characters. My main (a healer) raids and in my spare time I'm leveling up two alts: one to farm with (better than my healer can) and one to tank (as tanking seems to be the hardest to find component for instance groups). Three seems to be about as many as I can juggle actively -- though I have a mid-level Paladin waiting in the wings, working on it would mean I'd neglect another character. Now that I've told my tale, I'm asking you: how many characters do you play, and why?
Personalizing your profile on Massively
Have you been itching to add your own personal icon to your Massively comments but haven't had the time to create your own? Don't know even where to begin personalizing your icon? Well, you're in luck, because we here at Massively are all about making life easier for you, the reader. To that end we've put together a couple icons from today's top MMOs to get you started. To select a pre-made icon from the gallery below, simply download it to your desktop (right-click then save) and upload it to your profile.For those of you interested in making your own icons, it's a fairly simple process. Open up your favorite graphic editor (Photoshop et. al.) and create an image that is 64 pixels wide and 64 pixels tall. I recommend working with a larger image and scaling it down, since the format is a little small to work with. Be sure to save it somewhere easy to find -- those buggers are little, and blend in easily with the wildlife ensconced on your hard drive -- and voila, you've got a personalized piece of iconography of your very own.%Gallery-11142%
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
(Sorry, I couldn't resist the terrible visual pun.) One of the most common criticisms of fantasy games, besides "LOL games are for the nerds go outside", is that they perpetuate unrealistic stereotypes of female bodies. The typical fantasy girl, or so they say, is wearing about two pounds of chainmail, has a 20-inch waist and a DD-cup, and somehow manages to swing a sword that is taller than she is without messing up her hair. But while messing around with the WoW character creation screen, I realized that WoW really doesn't hold up to that stereotype. The human and gnome females are average size (well, as close as a gnome can be) and curvy. Night elves, trolls and draenei are thin but toned, easily able to sling around a Thunderfury. Warcraft dwarves, orcs and trolls would probably be considered overweight by most societal standards, but their bodies are proportional and they're extremely muscular. In fact, the only two really skinny models are the undead and blood elf females, both of which are repeatedly referenced as being unhealthy in the game. The blood elves are thin because of their magic addiction, and the undead are thin because of ... uh, being dead. In comparison, I took a look at the body types of the men. Human, dwarf, night elf, draenei, orc and tauren men are all ridiculously muscular, to the point where it looks like they've stuffed cantaloupes under the skin of their arms. Blood elf males are thin but toned, gnome males look about average (again, for a gnome), and undead and trolls are thin and hunchbacked. It seems that the men of WoW are the ones that suffer from an unrealistic standard of beauty. So I ask you -- would you like the ability for your avatars to have different body types? Do you think that the men and womeny things of WoW are unrealistic, or do you feel that you have enough options?
The Second Life/Orange Island Identity Summit
Orange Island, previously reported upon here, will be holding a day-long summit this Friday, November 16, on the nature of identity and how it relates to one's avatar in Second Life. It's a packed event, with a host of SL luminaries presenting, including Ordinal Malaprop, Torley Linden, Celebrity Trollop, Michi Lumin, and Forseti Svarog.The day's line-up looks like this: 9am – 10am – Avatar as a Personal Brand Speakers: Torley Linden, Celebrity Trollop, and Saeya Nyanda Moderator: Haver Cole 10am – 11am – Open Discussion on Avatar and Brand Identity 11am – 12pm – Persona and Identity Transparency in Business Speakers: Ordinal Malaprop, Forseti Svarog 12pm – 1pm – Open Discussion and Gallery Showing of Avatar Showcase Winners 1pm – 2pm – Non-Human Avatars Speakers: NeoBokrug Elytis, Kumi Kuhr, Michi Lumin Moderator: Adri Saarinen 2pm – 3pm – Open Discussion and Gallery Showing of You and Your Avatar photos 3pm – 5pm – Wind Down Mixer and Discussions Music and entertainment by DJ Doubledown Tandino Finally, leading up to the event, the preceding Thursday will witness the Avatar Showcase, where "Residents are invited to present their most unique and interesting avatar in this two hour event. The top three avatars will have their portraits made and displayed during one of the gallery exhibitions during the following day's discussions." Full information on Orange Island's website. I plan to be there on either day; if you've an SL account, come enjoy the festivities![Thanks, Adri!]
The Daily Grind: Best character creation
In all the games we've played, that's one thing we've often heard about. Many people from the earliest days, wanted ways of making themselves stand apart from the others. EverQuest introduced dyes to allow you to change your armor color, but many felt that wasn't enough. The community called for more and more ways to set themselves apart from the others in their MMO of choice. Some MMO makers have done a good job. Others, not so much. That said, this morning we wanted to ask what your favorite character creation in an MMO is? For me, personally, I'd have to say my top 2 would be: Second Life - You can control every single aspect of your avatar. This is, of course, why mine looks like Picasso's cubist rendition of someones really ugly little sister. (I can't figure that system out to save my life.) It is, unfortunately, the downside of having a system that customizable for people who aren't good at that kind of thing. Unless you get an artist or friend to hook you up, you'll always remain the ugly duckling in a land full of swans. City of Heroes (and more recently, City of Villains) which just seems so packed full of costume changes that it can take you an hour or more to even make a character the first time you sit down with that character generator. I still say it's the best mini-game ever. Add in veteran rewards like trench coats and capes at level 20, and it just gets better as you go along. Now I know I haven't touched on many other games, and I'm sure some people are sharpening their pitchforks now so they can tell me SL isn't a game. (Okay, it's a virtual world -- but it does have a character creator) So I leave it up to you. What are some of your favorites for character creation? Have you seen any that gave you highly powerful creation up front? Which ones have you spent hours in?
Real reactions to virtual environments
The always-interesting Terra Nova has a piece up about Nick Yee's the Proteus Effect, which is based around how we relate to (and interact with) stimuli in virtual worlds, specifically our and others' avatars.Basically, almost all of the research so far shows that we react to virtual stimuli exactly the same way as if it were real stimuli-- we don't want our characters standing too close to other characters, because it's a social convention in the real world that we all have our own individual space. But we still react positively to attractive avatars, whether we know it or not. No matter how much we're supposed to be roleplaying, or how much we realize consciously that the virtual world is different from the real world, we still react in a real way to virtual stimuli. It's heady stuff, but here's Terra Nova's soundbite, by Dmitri Williams: "You can take the person out of the real, but not the real out of the person."And Williams closes with an extremely interesting proposition, considering how the interaction works: what if, by making many parts of Outland dark and gloomy, Blizzard has caused us to react realistically and feel depressed? TN's informal survey says that players' favorite zone is Nagrand-- is that because it's sunny and green there? And if so, what does that say about our reaction to the expected upcoming expansion-- should Blizzard reconsider the dark, cold stretches of Northrend for a more tropical locale?
MMO VoIP: cross-reality calling
Telecoms startup Vivox has an intriguing vision, and an ambitiously-named product; "Immersion" aims to add voice chat to online games, with both persistent chat for guilds and dynamic chat for instancing. The product also seems to tie together various text-based chat methods, including regular messengers such as Yahoo and AIM as well as in-game chat.By supplying the (scalable) infrastructure for this service, Vivox hope Immersion will take the burden of providing voice chat away from game manufacturers, while making communication centralised and seamless for players. However, there are already several products that already achieve this -- many guilds have Ventrilo or TeamSpeak servers, while Xfire provides cross-game chatting. Vivox can go either way; it could corner another segment of this fragmented market, or -- if the company manage to deal directly with game developers -- it could become the one-stop-shop communication solution for gamers regardless of their MMO of choice.It'll be interesting to see which way the company goes; voice chat is certainly billed as the next stage of interactivity with MMOs, with Xbox Live gamers testifying to the added dimensions voice can add to various game genres. A recent press release on Vivox's website points to another direction in which the technology could become useful -- adding voice and centralised communication to online dating and social sites -- but reaching saturation point is going to be a tricky ride.[Via Gamesblog; City of Heroes screenshot from GameAmp]
Sex sells in Second Life
The boundary between virtual reality and the real world never ceases to bewilder, and this Wired article marvels at the amount of cold, hard cash changing hands in Second Life. Several Residents have given up their day jobs to work exclusively in this MMO, and it's a tidy earner for many others.Especially appropriate for this time of year, the Sex & Games blog points out that a large proportion of the objects being sold in SL are sexual in nature. An in-world gift would certainly be a novel approach to Valentine's Day.
