I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.
This was Sylvari Week at the official Guild Wars 2 website, so there are lots of links to official and unofficial articles about the Sylvari.
The Daily Illuminator had an interesting pre-announcement today:
As the delightful Felicia Day mentioned in her panel at San Diego Comic-Con, The Guild will have its very own Munchkin expansion next spring. We’re keeping the details under wraps for the moment, but you may want to watch The Guild‘s fifth season — airing now in a variety of places. Just sayin’.
(Also watch Felicia in Eureka on SyFy — not just for her rocket scientist character Dr. Holly Martin, but because Eureka is one of the geekiest shows on TV right now.)
You can see the entire panel on YouTube.* The Munchkin announcement is around the 6:00 mark . . . and if you were in that audience, thank you for the huge response!
Give North Korea some credit for finding a viable source of revenue:
What’s a dictator to do when his third-world economy is wheezing along on its last legs? Hack some video games, of course! According to a report in the New York Times, North Korea’s Kim Jong-il unleashed an army of young computer crackers on popular South Korean online gaming portals to find ways to make quick cash.
South Korean authorities claim that a squad of approximately 30 hackers operated from a base in China and were given the mission of breaching online gaming servers (including those of the immensely popular Lineage) to set up bot factories and automated farming collectives. The digital booty was then sold to gamers for a reported $6 million over two years.
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.
I got a few comments from non-gaming folks that these posts can get too long to scroll past, so it’s now in the extended post below.
If you know Randall, you know that there’s some NSFW commentary in this recap. If you don’t, you do now.
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.
I got a few comments from non-gaming folks that these posts can get too long to scroll past, so it’s now in the extended post below.
Greg Aronowitz has posted a retrospective of the first four years of The Guild:
I was fortunate enough to come aboard right at what could be argued as the tipping point for the show, with the “bonus feature” music video “Do You Want To Date My Avatar?” The video broke records, and went No.1 on several charts, including iTunes. People who had never played a video game or watched a web series were suddenly aware of The Guild, and the cross-over audience catapulted the show to numbers that previously were reserved for network television.
I had a great time working on the music video, but I had no idea at the time of the opportunities and adventures my association with The Guild would lead to. After reading Felicia’s article, I thought it might be fun to chronicle my involvement with the show on this special day. I went to my iPhoto, opened The Guild folder, and realized that I have over 4,000 photos! So I cancelled my lunch meeting, and put this quick run down memory lane together for you…
Update: The first episode of Season five just got posted:
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community. Another relatively quiet week in news about Guild Wars 2.
I got a few comments from non-gaming folks that these posts can get too long to scroll past, so it’s now in the extended post below.
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community. This week was pretty quiet after last week’s release of the new Winds of Change content in Cantha.
I got a few comments from non-gaming folks that these posts can get too long to scroll past, so it’s now in the extended post below.
A press release provides the details:
Season five of The Guild will return to Xbox LIVE on the Zune video Marketplace and MSN Video on Tuesday, July 26, sponsored by Microsoft and Sprint. Picking up where season four left off, season five takes the Guild members out from behind their computers and throws them into the real world like the show has never seen before, with new locations, guest stars, celebrity cameos and more!
The Guild stars writer/creator Felicia Day (Eureka, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog) as Codex, a lovable geek gamer addicted to an online role-playing game. Season five follows the characters of The Guild as they travel to a gaming convention called MEGAGAME-O-RAMACON. “Conventions like San Diego Comic-Con and Penny Arcade Expo have been a part of our experience promoting The Guild and connecting with fans,” says Felicia Day. “I wanted to bring that unique experience of a going to a con to the screen.” In addition to regular cast members Vincent Caso, Jeff Lewis, Amy Okuda, Sandeep Parikh and Robin Thorsen, season five will feature recognizable guest stars from the science fiction and genre community as well as over 200 extras.
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community. The big news this week was the release of the first segment of the Winds of Change content in Cantha.
I got a few comments from non-gaming folks that these posts can get too long to scroll past, so it’s now in the extended post below.
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community. Lots of information this week as a result of last week’s Press Day and Fan Day events.
I got a few comments from non-gaming folks that these posts can get too long to scroll past, so it’s now in the extended post below.
Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me this link all about just how insanely bad MMORPG players can be in their chosen game environments. I found this entry particularly interesting, as it isn’t the gamers being dicks . . . it’s the company running the game:
You’re playing a game where you kill things. What do you do with a giant dragon that kills things, can only be woken by killing four smaller dragons first and is now trying to kill you? If you said “kill it” you just surprised the hell out of Sony who, to be fair, have never claimed they weren’t wearing human-skin suits while studying these Earth things called “game-ers.” Kerafyrm the Sleeper was EverQuest‘s dragon-equivalent of Sauron, if Sauron drove the Death Star to work. It had a hundred times as many hit points as any other boss, was immune to most damage, had two spammable instant-kill attacks because screw you and didn’t work right because it was online and programmed by Sony.
It forced the three top guilds to co-operate, which makes herding cats look easier than getting Bollywood extras to move in step. It was Sesame Street by way of Lord of the Rings, specifically the end of the third movie, since for over three hours, 180 players turned themselves into a Sisyphean Zerg horde. Resurrecting each other faster than the monster could kill them, they put in Herculean feats of teamwork that cruelly mocked the concept of “fun.” They fought like warrior poets, they fought like Scotsmen and eventually ground the boss down to 22 percent health — at which point Sony turned the whole thing off and acted like it was the players’ fault. So if you’re wondering how they can keep the PlayStation Network off for a week and act like that’s fine, it’s because they’ve been practicing.
They took their ball and went home, where their ball was a giant harbinger of doom and the focus of the entire game.
Showing less regard for their users than an Iron Maiden, they released a rubbish (and later disproven) excuse about how Kerafyrm’s programming had been distracted by an NPC — and you’ll notice how even their own excuse is based on their incompetence — before simply apologizing and resetting the entire event, telling players to try again. It was like Lucy tricking Charlie Brown if Lucy was making millions of dollars making Charlie Brown miss, and if it took three man-weeks to run up to the football.
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