Month: August 2011

Playing DPS: From Good to Great

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s been a while since I wrote about actually playing MMOs, rather than just hypothesising about trends, changes and so on. It’s about time I talked about my favourite pastime.

You might think that as long as you’re top of the damage charts that you can rest easy. You’re pouring out the pain in your preferred manner and bosses are falling over with ease. Job done, surely?

Alas, no.

The thing that separates good DPS from great DPS is being able to dish out damage while doing a multitude of other things as well. It’s not just about mashing your primary nuke button until your finger goes through the keyboard, through the desk and starts playing staccato on your kneecap. Read on and I’ll explain.

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Trading in Titan

Posted on by Gazimoff

News recently emerged that Diablo 3 will feature several in-game auction houses. One of these will use in-game gold to buy goods, while the other will use real cash. Putting the argument aside about this being a good or bad idea, I wanted to take a look at what this means for Titan, Blizzard’s next MMO.

It’s likely that Titan will feature an auction house of some description. Depending on how successful the RMT (Real Money Trade) auction house is in Diablo 3, it’s also likely that Titan will have the same kind of setup.

  • A gold, BlueBucks or other in-game currency based auction house where commodity items like common crafting materials are bought and sold. The kind of stuff that’s easy to get and will save you a bit of time but nothing more
  • A Real Currency based auction house where everything that’s rare gets bought and sold. Hard-to-find crafting materials, rare items and pre-made characters are all likely to end up here.

Yes, it’s possible that the Titan auction house will support character sales too.

While the previous gold-making champions are understandably excited about the potential to make money from Diablo 3, I think they’re missing the point a little. This is a test. Blizzard are getting a feel for the reaction from the players now. Once the game launches they’ll be able to pull off live data to see how it’s actively being used.

The potential for an RMT based auction house in a full-fledged MMO is huge. How huge? Let me show you.
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If Not You, Who Else?

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’m beginning to feel like there’s a crunch brewing. It’s almost like the shocks that happen before the earthquake, where you know something is going to happen but you can’t quite put your finger on what.

It started off with the comments I’d spot on Twitter from players saying they were hanging up their Warcraft boots and going to Rift. Not because Rift was the hot new game (that’s supposed to be Star Wars: The Old Republic) but because they were just fed up. Fed up of the repetition of daily quests (and let’s be fair, the Molten Front daily grind is by far a huge one) or fed up of the raiding content.

Then there was the news that Warcraft had lost 300 thousand subscribers. This, after Blizzard gave every North American veteran player a free 2nd copy and they opened up trial accounts to be infinite in duration. If I were an analyst on the Activision-Blizzard investor calls I would seriously be asking what their churn rate is.

So what gives? Where’s everyone going? At this point I could only do what any self-respecting blogger would – ask people.

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Rebuilding My Blogroll

Posted on by Gazimoff

If you saw the splash page earlier or read one of the various tweets on Twitter, today there’s been a bit of a change going on at Mana Obscura. I’ve decided that it was high time to move from shared hosting to a virtual private server and save a wedge of cash every month in the process. What’s the difference? One’s like buying a toy car while the other’s like an Airfix model. Some assembly required.

As always when moving home there are some things that get broken, and websites are no exception. It seems that in the move from there to here my blogroll has been lost. The list of sites I read and recommend has vanished.

I could try and scribble it down from memory but I’d probably miss a ton of great blogs that I really should be reading. So I figure it’s about time to give it a refresh anyway – off with the no-longer-updated and in with the fresh new content!

If you think there’s a blog out there I should be reading (even your own) then post it in the comments! I’ll be updating my blogroll over the weekend, adding ones that fit with the theme of the site (gaming, MMOs, geek culture, etc). Don’t be afraid to suggest podcasts as well while you’re there!

Thank you all for your help and patience while I finish ironing things out and unpacking stuff from teacrates. Hopefully it won’t be much longer.

Review: PingCraft LagKiller (Part 1)

Posted on by Gazimoff

Warcraft can be a challenging game at the best of times. Whether it’s fighting raid bosses, battling it out in arenas or just trying to cram daily quests into our hectic schedule we all want to be playing at our best.

There’s various things as gamers that we can do to improve our game time. One is making sure we’re using a computer with enough grunt to handle our favourite MMOs. The next is to select keyboards, mice and other peripherals that support our individual styles of play.

The final piece is our internet connection to the game servers. This is the one thing we sometimes struggle with. You can spend ages trying to pick a good ISP or even move house to get better speeds. Sometimes though there’s pretty much nothing you can do.

This is where latency reduction and tunnelling services like PingCraft’s LagKiller come in – aiming to reduce your in-game latency for a small monthly fee. But does it actually work or is it just some snake-oil scam? Time to put it to the test.

Continue reading “Review: PingCraft LagKiller (Part 1)”