three-years
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Storyboard: The way it was for three years
Roleplaying is the same as it ever was. People are still shoehorning in lore characters into backstories, someone is a sparkly magic vampire, and you can still turn a corner in a tavern to find two people with a decided lack of gear or public shame. (In Second Life, that corner is the one you turn to download the game.) But I've had three years of talking about it, so it's at least a little different than it was. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it's better. Every year I like to take a look back at the past year, talk about what worked well, what didn't work at all, and what I'd like to do in the future. So it is for this year, complete with a nice big surprise down at the end there. Regular readers may be less surprised, but you can just bear with me.
Star Trek Online celebrates two million 'captains'
On the verge of its third anniversary, Star Trek Online has good reason to celebrate. In a state of the game post, Executive Producer Dan Stahl says that the title is growing by leaps and bounds: "You may have noticed that more than two million captains are continuing their voyages in Star Trek Online. With sustained increases in daily participation, the game is richer and more alive than ever before." Stahl looked back over the accomplishments and milestones of 2012, including Star Trek Online's transition to a free-to-play format. For the game's third anniversary, the team is releasing a featured episode on Thursday that will have a special reward for those who play it between January 31st and February 14th. The reward will be an Ambassador Class (the Enterprise-C model) for Federation players and the Kamarag Class for Klingon fans. Stay tuned for an on-air interview with Dan Stahl about STO in tomorrow's episode of Massively Speaking!
Champions Online celebrates its third anniversary
Has it already been three years since Cryptic Studios launched its second superhero MMO? It must be because Champions Online is riding high on the smell of birthday cake and fun events. Cryptic has several anniversary activities planned for the next couple of weeks, including a leveling contest that's running from now until September 6th. Every character that you level up to 40 during this period will give you a shot at several prizes, including a $250 Amazon gift card and custom art. The studio's also collecting Champions fan art in exchange for special unlocks and Facebook publicity. Further anniversary events in September will be announced at a later date, but Cryptic did hint that there will be giveaways, community hang-outs, and big sales.
Warhammer Online: Three years later
To this day, I don't know what quite came over me when I decided to throw my chips into the blogging scene to cover Warhammer Online, eight months before the game launched. Like many of you, I had been a long-time reader of MMO blogs, but I was intimidated at trying my hand at joining in, perhaps elevating these writers to the status of legendary wordsmiths who penned unequaled prose in our lifetimes. Or I just didn't want to be one of a thousand World of Warcraft bloggers who dominated the scene. Just a thought. In any case, it was a terrific decision to do so on my part. I found that I had a passion not only for MMOs but for talking about them, and I loved connecting with other writers and readers and players, which happens with blogging. I've been asked from time to time if I regret picking Warhammer Online as the game that I latched onto for a couple of years, and I always say no -- no regrets. The game was fun, but the coverage was an unparalleled rollercoaster of anticipation, hype, fun, speculation, promise, disappointment, and above all, ideas. Wonderful, flawed, captivating ideas. I haven't touched WAR since 2010, so perhaps I'm not the best source for the latest and greatest in the game. But what I do have to offer is a humble blogger's perspective on what went right, what went wrong, and why I'm ultimately happy that WAR came into being and is chugging along on today, its third anniversary.
EVE Evolved: Three years of EVE Evolved
A few days shy of three years ago, I joined Massively and published the very first edition of this column. Since April 27th, 2008, EVE Online players have received their weekly dose of EVE Evolved every Sunday at 6 p.m. EDT. I still remember the first few articles as if they were published only a few months ago, and three years on I'm almost surprised that the column is still going strong. I often worry about running out of ideas, but as the column's name suggests, EVE is continually evolving and providing new things to discuss. The column now houses over 150 articles on a huge range of topics, from in-depth multi-part guides drawing from first-hand experience to expansion speculation, opinion pieces and even stories. As usual, I'm celebrating the anniversary of the column by running a competition for readers. With the column's readership having grown a lot over the years, I'll be expanding the prize pool this year by giving away three massive mystery prizes worth over 500 million ISK each to three lucky entrants. To enter, all you need to do is leave a comment stating what your favourite EVE Evolved article this year was, what topic you'd like to see covered in a future edition of the column, or what in-game player or organisation you'd like to see featured in an EVE Spotlight interview. You will need an active EVE account to claim the prize, but there's no need to post your character name here. The winners will be contacted via email and their names will be announced in this post on Sunday the 1st of May. UPDATE: Congratulations go to Uniqdragon, mdubs28 and Thorium88, who will be contacted via email to arrange receipt of their prizes. In this week's retrospective EVE Evolved, I look back at some of the highlights from the third year of the column.
Siren server breaks 2,000 Aht Urhgan defenses on Final Fantasy XI
The city of Al Zahbi, the jewel of the East, is besieged on all sides. Her enemies build their reinforcements, storm through the outlying regions, and then beset their rage upon the walls of the city itself. But there is one hardened group of adventurers who will not let them pass -- who will not let the city fall. The Siren server.Congratulations to the Siren server of Final Fantasy XI for having over 2,000 successful defenses of Al Zahbi without losing the city once! Yes, that's right, Siren is undefeated when it comes to stopping the hordes of beastmen from tearing the city apart. In fact, out of all of FFXI's 32 servers, they are the only undefeated server.This also means that Siren has never lost the city in over three years of gameplay. Al Zahbi was released in the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion pack, which arrived to all territories in 2006. So cheers to you, Siren, for three years and 2,000 defenses of Al Zahbi. Keep that Astral Candescence safe!
WoW Moviewatch: Serenity Now and the funeral
Caution: There is some offensive language in this video.This weekend was the third anniversary of WoW Insider, and when I was putting together the big list of our top ten stories ever, I noticed there was one missing. Even though it happened in April of 2006 (we started posting in December of 2005), we never really covered the Serenity Now funeral attack. But it is one of the biggest stories in World of Warcraft, whether you think it's atrocious or hilarious or whatever, so during today's Moviewatch, we'll give it its due.A woman who played WoW passed away in real life, and her guildies decided to hold an ingame funeral for her -- in the contested zone of Wintergrasp Winterspring (of course -- too much Wrath lately, sorry) On a PvP server. And though now, four years into the game, we know exactly what would happen, back then, it came as a surprise -- as you've probably seen in the video (set to some amazing music), the guild Serenity Now crashed the funeral and pretty much decimated everyone who showed up.
WoW Insider's top ten stories of all-time
Today, December 6, is the third anniversary of our little site. We actually started posting a few weeks beforehand, to get up and running, but the official launch was over on our parent Joystiq on December 6th, 2005. Since then, we've posted over 12,000 posts, commenters have commented over half a million times, and people have visited the site over two hundred million times (millions more if you count all the RSS readers out there). Oh, and we've covered nine classes, 27 builds, nine major content patches (and hundreds if not thousands of class and content changes), and absorbed the angry yells, QQ tears, cheerful applause and apathetic mehs of all of you hundred of thousands of readers. What a ride it's been.And so, to look back at our little piece of history today, we figured we'd check back over the records (all the records we have), and come up with a top ten list of our most popular stories of all time. Keep in mind that this is a list of our most popular stories -- while it does include our most popular posts of all time, we had to make a few tweaks and filters to make it all make sense (our most popular page of all time, other than the front page, surprise, is actually page 2). But this will offer you a good look at just what WoW Insider is all about -- from our great looks at some of the biggest stories in Warcraft, to an interesting view of just what you, our readers are really interested in.Thanks for the memories -- the site has only gotten bigger almost every single month during the past three years, and that's because readers like you come and visit to see what we're posting. Click the first link below to see story number 10, and follow the links all the way up to number one.Number 10: Blizzard takes a stand on erotic RP...
