My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s round-up was seriously delayed by the issue I talked about yesterday — the major meltdown at The Old Reader‘s server farm. Due to the time it took to get the site back up and running — and the fact that they were still restoring feed items — today’s collection may have a few gaps.
The election campaign is in full swing in Lion’s Arch, and GuildMag also has up-to-the-minute reporting from the front lines.
The new issue of GuildMag is now online (that is, GuildMag the Guild Wars 2 online magazine, as opposed to the regular website where my weekly column appears). Go to the website to get the details or click the image below to go directly to the front page of the new issue:
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s edition is packed full of information and opinion on what is coming to GW2 during the rest of 2013, based on ArenaNet’s Colin Johanson’s livestream, interview, and long, detailed blog post. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
The election campaign is in full swing in Lion’s Arch, and GuildMag also has up-to-the-minute reporting from the front lines.
Firefly Online (FFO) is a multi-user, social online role-playing game that will initially be available for smartphones and tablets, including those based on iOS and Android operating systems.
Check out updates and pre-register at www.keepflying.com
From the official site:
Firefly Online is a social role playing game (RPG) based on Firefly, Joss Whedon’s cult-hit television series. Firefly Online (FFO) is currently in development for iOS and Android, and may expand to include additional platforms.
In Firefly Online, players assume the role of a ship captain as they hire a crew and seek out adventures, all the while trading with and competing against the millions of other players to try to survive in the Verse: find a crew, find a job, keep flying.
FFO provides a variety of gameplay activities and systems so that players can fully experience life in the Verse.
- Assume the role of a ship captain — create a crew and customize a ship
- Aim to misbehave in space and planet-side adventures
- Cross-platform player experience across devices (pick-up and play from anywhere)
- Unique social features connecting Firefly fans
- Create a shiny ship and explore the Verse
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s release — the Bazaar of the Four Winds — has been greeted with much praise and thanks (except for stick-in-the-mud types like me who don’t like jumping puzzles). There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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