My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The big news is that ArenaNet has switched to a biweekly content release schedule — new content every two weeks. Next week’s release will be the Bazaar of the Four Winds. There was also some confusion in the community as ArenaNet appeared to say there would never be any expansions to GW2, then clarified that the Living Story is going to be the primary content distribution, but that they hadn’t ruled out boxed expansions. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
July 5, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
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June 28, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The Sky Pirates of Tyria update went live this week along with a large number of trait changes for the professions. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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June 21, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The Dragon Bash is still going strong in Tyria, and we’re learning about the next content update coming next week: The Sky Pirates of Tyria. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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Duffelblog will probably get a lot of the “Onion article mistaken for real news” action today
It’s guaranteed to get on a lot of thin-skinned people’s radar:
Amidst cries of outrage and controversy, Activision unveiled the latest addition to the Call of Duty franchise at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week, entitled Call of Jihad: Scourge of the Infidels. The first-person shooter, developed in conjunction with some of al-Qaeda’s top field experts, will be launched for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 for release on September 11, 2013.
Like previous titles in the series, Call of Jihad will feature campaign, online multiplayer and a “Suicide” mode — reminiscent of “Survival” in Modern Warfare 3 — with the objective being to slaughter as many innocents as possible before a quick-reaction force arrives.
The campaign takes place in an alternate reality where infamous al-Qaeda operatives like Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are still alive and Khalid Sheik Mohammed is a free man. The opening mission of the campaign, displayed as part of a teaser trailer at E3, takes place in the Pakistani compound raided by SEAL Team Six. The player must single-handedly dispatch the American commandos as Bin Laden escapes on a camel before time elapses.
Game developers also confirmed the martyrdom perk would always be turned on.
“It’s fucking sick!” squealed die-hard gamer Bryan Campbell, 17, of Manhattan, New York. “I give it two severed heads up!”
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June 18, 2013
Console game industry model is broken – must be patched with huge wads of customer money
At Techdirt, Tim Cushing explains why the console gaming industry’s problems should not be “fixed” by taking away the customer’s rights:
If the current business model is unsustainable, why is that the consumer’s fault? More specifically, why are customers being pushed into giving up their “first sale” rights, along with being asked to plug the holes in the leaky business model with wads of hard-earned cash?
On top of this imposition is the assumption the current model is the only model [$200m movie, anyone?] and that mankind greatly benefits from “thousands of developers” crafting AAA titles. This is completely backward. The industry exists because of its customers, not despite them. AAA studios are not benevolent deities. They’re companies that exist because there’s a market for their products. If this market dies, so do they. If the prices are too high, customers buy elsewhere. Or not at all.
[. . .]
It’s beginning to look like a few members of the industry have been cribbing pages from the disastrous playbook of the recording industry. Raise prices. Blame customers. Bend the world to your business model. Is it only a matter of time before the gaming industry begins lobbying Congress to shut down secondhand sales?
Oh, and if the above twitrant weren’t galling enough, Cliff B. throws in a little something for those who find the online requirements of the Crossbone to be dealbreaker.
“If you can afford high speed internet and you can’t get it where you live direct your rage at who is responsible for pipe blocking you,” he said.
Really? Maybe I’ll direct my rage at the entitled jackass who’s supporting a company’s decision to effectively limit its own market simply because it can’t live without some sort of DRM infection. And what if you can’t afford high speed internet? Well, you must be one of those people who live in the area marked “Whogivesashitland” in Cliffy’s mental map. And trust me, plenty of rage has been directed at the “pipe blockers,” but they care even less about their customer base than the area of the gaming industry Bleszinski represents.
Those interested in gutting the resale market to protect their margins are turning potential customers into enemies. If you can’t adapt, you can’t succeed. These moves being made by Microsoft (and supported by industry mouthpieces) are nothing more than attempts to subsidize an unsustainable business model by forcibly extracting the maximum toll from as many transactions as possible. The industry is not a necessity or a public good. If it’s going to make the changes it needs to survive, it needs to give up this delusion.
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June 14, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The Dragon Bash is underway in Tyria, with holographic dragons to watch, dragon minions to fight, dragon piñatas to bash and lots of other attractions. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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June 7, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. We’re still experiencing the last stages of the Southsun Cove content, and starting to get details on the next content update: The Dragon Bash, coming June 11th. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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May 31, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s focus has been on the new content release “Last Stand at Southsun”. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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May 25, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. Due to scheduled maintenance, I had to stop updating the post about an hour before I usually publish, so a few regular items may have been missed. GuildMag has an updated look and feel this week, which was part of the reason for the maintenance on Friday. Next week will see the release of the next content update and we have some advance information on that plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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May 22, 2013
Hyperinflation in Diablo III
At the Ludwig von Mises Institute blog, Peter Earle looks at the “virtual Weimar” economy of Diablo III:
As virtual fantasy worlds go, Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 3 is particularly foreboding. In this multiplayer online game played by millions, witch doctors, demon hunters, and other character types duke it out in a war between angels and demons in a dark world called Sanctuary. The world is reminiscent of Judeo-Christian notions of hell: fire and brimstone, with the added fantasy elements of supernatural combat waged with magic and divine weaponry. And within a fairly straightforward gaming framework, virtual “gold” is used as currency for purchasing weapons and repairing battle damage. Over time, virtual gold can be used to purchase ever-more resources for confronting ever-more dangerous foes.
But in the last few months, various outposts in that world — Silver City and New Tristram, to name two — have borne more in common with real world places like Harare, Zimbabwe in 2007 or Berlin in 1923 than with Dante’s Inferno. A culmination of a series of unanticipated circumstances — and, finally, a most unfortunate programming bug — has over the last few weeks produced a new and unforeseen dimension of hellishness within Diablo 3: hyperinflation.
[. . .]
Two obvious solutions for managers of virtual economies include more vigilant bot restrictions and close — indeed, real-time — monitoring of faucet output, sink absorption, prices, and user behaviors. More critically, though, whether structured as auctions or exchanges, markets must be allowed to operate freely, without caps, floors, or other artificialities. Unrestricted (real) cash auctions would for the most part preempt and obviate black markets.
One also surmises, considering the level of planning that goes into designing and maintaining virtual gaming environments, that some measure of statistical monitoring and/or econometric modeling must have been applied to Diablo 3’s game world. The Austrian School has long warned of the arrogance and naïveté intrinsic to applying rigid, quantitative measures to the deductive study of human actions. Indeed; if a small, straightforward economy generating detailed, timely economic data for its managers can careen so completely aslant in a matter of months, should anyone be surprised when the performance of central banks consistently breeds results which are either ineffective or destabilizing?
Update, 24 June: It’s worth examining just who benefits the most from inflationary episodes like this, both in the game and in the real world:
Just as surely as if someone hit “print” on bonds at the U.S. Treasury Department and the Fed made more money of out thin air, the new gold in the game’s economy moved from the hands of its first owners — whose purchasing power was enhanced without contributing anything productive to the economy — to the hands of those who received it for the goods they offered in the “Diablo III” auction house. In so doing, the first holders of the new gold (the cheats) could buy more than they would otherwise have been able to, stimulating demand far outside of their legitimate capacity to do so. By bidding up items simply because they wanted them and could pay more for them, they caused the market to clear artificially high prices.
Reports from the “Diablo III” forums on Battle.net, one of Blizzard’s official sites, include complaints of people selling gems worth 30 million gold for 100–400 million gold; another participant on the forum griped that players “sold garbage for hugely inflated prices.” All told, only 415 out of the estimated three million subscribers who play every month actually exploited the glitch. But all it takes is a few rotten apples to spoil the barrel. In the real economy, the men and women of the Fed and the beneficiaries of their fraudulent money creation comprise a very small percentage of the total number of participants in the real market.
As the second holders of the new gold spent it on goods they desired in the virtual economy, they, too, stimulated demand far out of proportion to their productivity on the market. This raised the prices of what they purchased, just like the cheats who exploited the glitch to begin with. As this gold spread like a ripple on the surface of a body of water, each player’s purchasing power eroded further and further as prices rose higher and higher.
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May 17, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The new chapter of the living story, Secret of Southsun, went live this week and there’s lots of discussion, advice, and enthusiasm, plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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May 10, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The next chapter of the living story, Secret of Southsun, will be going live next week and there’s much anticipation for what will be included, plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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May 3, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week has lots of reaction to the final chapter of the Flame and Frost living story and some analysis of the GW2 end-game economy, plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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April 26, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week has lots of information about the final chapter of the Flame and Frost living story and new sPvP features plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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April 19, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This is going to be a busy weekend, as ArenaNet is holding another free trial (keys were distributed through several fan sites), plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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