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The Daily Grind: How well do you know your in-game friends?
I'm a fairly open guy. As far as I'm concerned, my job makes me something of a public figure, and that means a certain amount of transparency is implied. So I don't shy away from letting people know who I am, and while I'm frequently roleplaying, I make an effort to get to know the people behind the characters. I like to get to know the people behind the characters to see who it is I'm playing with. Not everyone else feels the same way. For some people, logging in to play EVE Online means that it's EVE Online time, not time to play the game while talking about television in chat. That can lead to fewer long-term friendships that transcend the game, but it also means that you have a more immersive experience. So what about you? Do you get to know your in-game friends as people, or do you stick to just knowing them as characters? 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!
Ask Massively: Something approaching a tribute to Safety Dance edition
Safety Dance was a song released by Men Without Hats in 1982. It is astonishing for me to realize this, but there is now a substantial portion of our audience that post-dates not only this song but the entire decade. So allow me to say right now that yes, the 1980s were a real time, they did in fact happen, and if that video doesn't tell you a good portion of what you need to know about that time period, any further elaboration won't make it clearer. OK, maybe one further piece. This week's questions have absolutely nothing to do with dancing, safety, or looking at one's hands. Instead, it's about pricing models for games and the never-ending discussion about where one draws the line between an MMO and something that is not an MMO. As always, you can leave questions in the comment field for next week, or you can mail them along to ask@massively.com.
The Daily Grind: Why don't you like roleplaying?
If you're playing an MMO, you're roleplaying. No, you might not be peppering your speech with authentic Klingon or trying to simulate the dialogue of a nigh-immortal elf, but you're still pretending to be someone other than yourself on the screen. And yet roleplaying remains an intensely divisive force in MMOs; there are players who swear by it and players who go out of their way to interfere with it. Even if you fall into the former camp, odds are pretty much absolute that you've spent good chunks of time cursing at one particularly obnoxious storyline or another. Whether or not you take part in large-scale roleplaying, today we ask -- what don't you like about it? If you're a non-participant, does it seem like too much work for too little reward? If you RP regularly, do you dislike the inter-player drama that so frequently results? If you're actively opposed, do you feel it takes development time away from more important game elements? Or do you have some other dislike completely unrelated to any of that? 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 Daily Grind: Do you mend fences or burn bridges?
It happens no matter what you do: you get into a bad group of players, or you and your guild leader (or shell leader, or supergroup leader, or whatever) have a falling-out, or you just tagged something that another person needs. Whatever the reasons, feelings can flare when playing an MMO, and we tend to invest a lot of ourselves in our virtual avatars. Some people, when confronted with rising tempers, try to get everyone to calm down and even things out. It's not that big of a deal, after all -- it's just a video game, and it's better to make friends than enemies. On the other hand, some people would rather take the chance to hold the moral high ground and lash out where it's appropriate. After all, if you don't tell people what they do wrong, they'll never learn -- and it's just a video game, how could they be so upset when you give them what they have coming? So which do you generally try to be? When everyone gets touchy, do you try and be the person calming people down, or the one stirring them up? Do you try to convince people to stick with a bad group, or do you let the dead weight know what they're doing wrong and then get the heck out of Dodge?
Sony opens complete EverQuest 2 database to researchers
The players of EverQuest 2 might be pleased to learn that their gameplay may further science. They may be less enthused, however, to learn that a complete record of their interactions with one another is being studied by researchers. Following a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ars technica's John Timmer reports, "With the cooperation of Sony, a collaborative group of academic researchers at a number of institutions have obtained the complete server logs from the company's EverQuest 2 MMORPG." That's right. This is everything you've ever done in the game, but it's all in the name of science.The researchers are among those who believe that massively multiplayer online games can be used to model real world collective behavior. The task ahead of them is a daunting one, with close to 60 TB of data to pore over. "The end result is a log that included four years of data for over 400,000 players that took part in the game, which was followed up with demographic surveys of the users. All told, it makes for a massive data set with distinct challenges but plenty of opportunities," Timmer writes.
