Madscientist.net

So it seems as though this has been a week for topics to sweep through the blogosphere (I really hate that term. Can’t we call it something else? The blogoverse? Blogtinuum? That which is blogged? But I digress).

One topic has been crafting in MMO’s. I stumbled into that topic rather accidentally when I made a coincidental post to those made by the Knights of the MMO Roundtable. Amused at the coincidence I posted trackbacks to them with a little lighthearted jab to which Ryan Shwayder responded by throwing me into the incoming traffic of the information superhighway.

The other topic which has be racing through our electronic Zeitgeist is the subject of Real Money Transactions (or RMT for short). Started off by a post from Dan Reubenfield
which has been answered by Amber Night, Broken Toys, Tipa, Wizzel CogWizzleton CarrierCog IV, and apparently a rabid weasel.

Throwing caution to the wind I thought I would post my own thoughts concerning dealing with RMT. (more…)

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No. Not that kind of lore. This kind. I’ve been reading Lore Sjöberg’s postings for years. He writes about games, old Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, and the general accoutrement of growing up geek. He’s like my evil twin.

If I was, you know, funny.

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(Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series. Before reading it you should at least read the Role of Crafting in Massive Multiplayer Games, Synchronicity, and Crafting: My Argument Against Synchronicity. Optionally you might want to read Something for Everyone, Crafting in MMO’s (or Can’t We All Just Get Along?), and Craft This.

There will be a quiz.)

So I’m reminded of the old Saturday Night Live sketch with Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtain where they would do their ‘Point-Counter Point’ during the Weekend News update. It’s got nothing to do with Ryan or what I think of his ideas. Just one of those random connections that my brain tends to make.

I’m a big fan of crafting. In enjoy it a lot. In fact I do a fair amount of crafting-like activities in the Reality MMO (are they ever going to come out with Reality II? It feels like I’ve been waiting for it forever) including the painting of miniature figures, the brewing of beer, and the fletching arrows, among other things. So I suppose it isn’t at all unexpected that I have different views of crafting than Ryan. (more…)

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So completely unknown to me as I was writing up my posting about Something for Everyone on Friday Steve Danuser, Ryan Shwayder, and Aggro Me got together to post articles about crafting (I feel so left out). (more…)

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I really liked the latest comic on Order of the Stick. (more…)

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MMO’s need to be fun. This stunning insight has been brought to you thanks to my keen grasp of the obvious, but it’s true. If the game isn’t fun then no amount of artwork or advertising is going to get people to stick around, and since MMO’s make a large amount of their money off of customer subscriptions this is a Bad Thingâ„¢. (more…)

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David Edery posted a small article on his blog about User Generated Content. In short it’s a list of the good points of UGC with links to existing games to illustrate each point and it’s worth a look. (more…)

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Martin Davies wrote an article for the Guardian Unlimited yesterday that discusses ‘griefing’ in online games. It’s a good article with some interesting ideas about self-policing communities and the pitfalls of such. I know it is a problem that I started thinking about back in the days of playing Meridian 59. (more…)

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Well, after much mucking around with my theme and the editing of a few posts I am now fully compliant with XHTML 1.0 (strict, not transitional) and CSS 2.0. I did this because the Firefox browser on my Ubuntu box wasn’t rendering the content correctly.

Because of various minor errors in my code I was sending anyone browsing the pages into ‘quirks’ mode. So I cleaned up everything with the help of W3C’s validator. Once I did that the page wasn’t rendering the way I wanted since it was relying on quirks mode to put certain things together in certain ways, so I had to update everything. Then I had to go back through any previous posts where I had put in extra code and make sure that code was compliant and rending correctly.

It’s been a royal pain and I’m not sure how long it will last since every post I write has the potential to break it but since it should speed up the rendering of pages and produce much more reliable results across multiple browsers I think it was worth it.

Of course Firefox is still rendering the page wrong.

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There’s an article on Terra Nova about the lawsuit filed by Marc Bragg against Linden Labs, makers of Second Life. Most of the article is a pretty interesting read that talks about how this is probably not going to be the big groundbreaking case that Marc Bragg wants to make it out to be. (more…)

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