Madscientist.net

For years I was on a quest. Like the mythical King Pellinore I was compelled to hunt for an elusive beast, occasionally finding the odd track or catching the fleeting glimpse of my quarry through mist shrouded woods. Sometimes I would find others along my journey who would tell me of seeing this creature as it passed them by and who would give me directions on where I could find it, but inevitably when I arrived I would find that they were mistaken and what they had seen was not the beast I sought.

So I gave up, and in doing so I came to realize the reason I could never catch my questing beast was because it simply didn’t exist. (more…)

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I’ve gone ahead and set up a gallery page that has a couple of animations that I’ve done over the years. I’m going to have to dig into the code a bit more to come up with something that is a bit easier to update but for now this should suffice.

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Richard Bartle wrote an article over on Terra Nova about a week ago that talks about how MMO’s aren’t democratic. He goes on to ponder the possibility of a private party paying for a server in which they control the rules and whether or not such a system would work. (more…)

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Raph Koster wrote an interesting three part post (post one, post two, post three) about the resource system in Ultima Online, how it was suppose to work, and why it didn’t. What is really interesting, at least to me, is how the resource system was suppose to tie very heavily to the behavior of creatures. (more…)

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So I’ve read there’s a possible danger of blogs being hit by spammers. “What are the odds of that happening to me?” I think. I’m a small, insignificant site tucked away in the corner of cyberspace. I’ve been running the blog for less than two weeks.

Today I come in to find 28 different comments, all apparently spam attached to one of my posts. I guess I can feel like a real person now. I’m receiving junk mail. Yay me.

Suffice it to say that Akismet is now turned on.

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Just a quick link to an animation that I found funny.

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MMO’s are my preferred form of games. I suppose it goes back to my many years playing Dungeons and Dragons and Champions with my friends around my parent’s dining room table. I’m completely aware that there are other forms of games but when I start thinking about elements of game design I inevitably tend towards elements of MMO’s.

As a gross generalization online games can be broken into player based games (often called twitch games) and character based games (I’m sure there’s a different term used by lots of people but I don’t happen to know what it is). Of course in truth there’s usually some overlap. Player based games such as Counterstrike, Doom, or Planetside can still be viewed as having elements of a character based game since the acquisition of certain weapons can be viewed as increasing attributes(DPS, Range, Accuracy) of the character. Character based games such as Everquest or Ultima Online involve a certain level of player skill around the deploying of attribute based abilities since the games aren’t turn based. In general, though, games are viewed as falling into one category or the other with character based being a lot more prevalent in the world of MMO’s. (more…)

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Found out yesterday that EQ II had passed WoW on MMORPG’s ranking list.

Gives me kind of a nice feeling to know that.

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At the beginning of last year I wrote a paper for one way to set up an MMO economy. I started with the idea of a an economy where the NPC value (in gold) of items would vary depending on the available supply. As items became more common the price would go down and as they became more rare the price would go up. Eventually there would be something of an equilibrium point reached (at least in theory). (more…)

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Raph Koster wrote an interesting post talking about the numbers on MMOGChart.com. He points out how different companies will use different metrics, the weaknesses of the different metrics, and what he thinks would be the ideal metric (unique connections per week).

Now I’m assuming that the idea of these metrics is to rate the ‘health’ of the game. If all you’re doing is trying to rate the fiscal strength of a game there’s already a bunch of numbers to use to do that (gross revenue, net profit, etc.), but it seems to me that if you’re trying to determine how ‘healthy’ a game is what you probably want to look at is how much people are playing. (more…)

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