Monthly Archives: January

New structures for your own settlement will come into play according to the needs of the non-player inhabitants of the village: in an early stage your townies will require a farm and perhaps a mine or a merchant. Later in the game, your settlement will probably need a bank or apothecary. In such case, a non-player-character will offer you an according quest to build the new structure. It’s up to you to place the new building where it suits your settlement best. You will need to keep a few factors in mind though, like power-supply – but don’t worry, it will be an easy and straightforward decision.

Upon placing the new structure you will see a construction-site of the yet to be finished building. A structure will need a few more resources to come into play, like rocks, and prefabs, according to the type of structure. You can pay these resources at once or invite your friends to invest a few of their resources into the new building. But beware: your competitors can use their resources to interfere with the construction, or even bringing it to a grinding halt alltogether. Once all resources are paid, the new structure comes into play immediately, raising the score of your settlement and probably offering new types of quests. When the new building is finished, everybody involved in its construction earn their share of gold and experience. 

A news case of virtual theft in Japan dwarfs the arrest of virtual burglar of Dutch Habbo Hotel: a teenager from Fukui illegaly obtained the ID and password from a former employee of Korean MMO-company Nexon to steal the virtual equivalent of 36 million Yen, roughly a whopping US$ 340.000, in Nexon’s MMO Mabinogi.
As Game|Life reports: “Obviously the Tokyo Metropolitan Police are treating this as a serious offense, but it will be interesting to see if it’s handled as the equivalent of the theft of a similar amount of real-world currency. One could argue that technically none of the stolen goods actually exist, though an argument could also be made in the opposite direction.”

Daedalus Project is the brainchild of Nick Yee who collected some 35.000 surveys from thousands of responding MMO-players in the recent 5 years. The project offers a wealth of information about their demographics and social and psychological findings. A nice introductory can be found at the Daedalus Gateway, all in-depth categories can be found here. Great work, Nick.

When creating a tile-based game, it’s commonsense to use a level-editor as a tool to create all necessary game-maps. This is especially true for a game with a huge in-game-world like Coobico.
Here is a sneak peak on the level-editor we’ve written for Coobico – it’s build in Flash, just like the game itself, and it’s our swiss army-knife to create the whole caboodle of Qubus’ Island.

The following image depicts the general “workbench” of the level-editor when creating a new map: the size of the according map can be chosen here, along with a “standard-tile” which is used to fill up the map initially.

The image below shows a snippet of how tiles are “drawn” to the map with the level-editor: it offers a quite versatile choice and combination of effects – from slightly changing the elevation of each single tile to subtle changes in color-blending to create the illusion of shadows and highlights.

Besides its graphic elements each map consists of a set of “collision-data”, which let interaction with the map come to live: here it is controlled which parts of the map are accessible, to avoid avatars walking through walls for example. Additionally, the map can be embroidered with further details, such as spots where sounds are played back or other special effects are triggered.

Stay tuned for more and larger screenshots…

Introducing the monster-hunter: whenever some hazard-spot or fiendish structure turns up near your village, the settlement’s wellbeing and productivity is lowered. To counter-balance this effect, it is possible to build a monster-hunter’s establishment nearby. At a monster-hunter’s you will also be able to buy useful adventurer’s gear.

A quaint news about World of Warcraft was on the beat yesterday, giving an interesting insight into Blizzards way of handling server-information for World of Warcraft: a player named Tyram has reached a cap on how much money you can carry in WOW: Tyram, who’s currently keeping a “do-not-disturb"-message, has a whopping 214,748 gold, 36 silver and 48 copper under his belt. Now, does this amount ring a bell? Incidentally the highest positive number for a signed 32bit integer is 2,147,483,648 – indicating Blizzard uses such 32bit integers to store the amount of coins players in WOW are carrying. Interesting choice, cause a signed integer means that you could also possibly have a negative amount of gold…

By the way, the number of 2,147,483,648 led to a short outage of Flickr at the start of the year: an integer overflow occurred after the 2147483647. picture was uploaded on DEC 29th.

Mineshafts, caverns and abandoned ruins hold a lot of valuable loot for venturous players. They can be kept as rare accessories or turned into cash at the local alchemist’s store (which also keeps useful adventurers’ gear on display). Sometimes a find will be obscure and unknown to the player and needs to be identified by the alchemist first before it can be sold – such finds yield more experience points and gold if a player has the temp-job “archaeologist”.
Take a glance at a few rare items to be found. 

Sometimes playing MMOs appears more like science than fun (besides, exactly the reason why we started out with Coobico) – you need to memorize effects and combos of weapons, spells, monsters and attacks. You need to learn and stick to role behaviours like “tank”, “damage-dealer” and the like to be able to blend in with parties of other players. And to communicate with them, of course, you need to learn the MMOs’ specific jargon of abbreviations (also called “leet-speak"). Earthtimes has a posting “‘4/6 lfm tank and dd’ - The jargon of online gaming”, which explains a few of these terms to the N00bs. Techrepublik has much older, but more exhaustive list.

This is a mine, one of the resource-spots in Coobico, where players can harvest. By working the mine, players can gather rocks – and of course find the occasional hidden treasure, if they are lucky enough.
The other two kinds of resource-spots are farms and water-mills. 

Second Life saw in-world banking activities throughout the past years with close to thirty lending institutions setting up their “business” in SL. A lot of them seemed to be dubious, offering unsustainably high returns, even resembling lendings-schemes where you are prompted by badly written emails to donate money to some third world bank account.
One of the most prominent cases was the demise of Ginko Financial in August 2007. Being founded by a member called “Portercarrero” (possibly one Andre Sanchez from Sao Paolo), and initially heartily embraced by Linden Labs’ founder Philip Rosedale, Ginko offered a 100 percent rate of interest (talking about unsustainably high returns). The rate quickly dropped to 44 percent yield per annum, all along with a daily withdrawal cap of approx. USD 19. Being cornered by intellectual property lawyer Benjamin Duranske, Portercarrero came to admit that he could not cover withdrawals. The affected residents went hyperbolic after this news, but it was too late already: the money was gone, after all a sum of around USD 750,000. Portercarrero had changed the corporate legal status of Ginko, yielding only pennies on the dollar. The Ginko depositors reacted with a class action lawsuit, but it’s highly doubtful if they will see their money again. (jackmyers.com has an insightful report about Ginko).

Yesterday, as a reaction to all these events, Linden Labs announced to effectively close down all banking-activities from 22nd of January on for non-official financial institutions:

“As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such as an ATM, located in Second Life, without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter…
Usually, we don’t step in the middle of Resident-to-Resident conduct – letting Residents decide how to act, live, or play in Second Life. But these “banks” have brought unique and substantial risks to Second Life, and we feel it’s our duty to step in...”

Sometimes it seems to be necessary to protect players from themselves. However, with Linden Labs’ pledge “We ask that between now and then, those who operate these “banks” settle up on any promises they have made to other Residents and, of course, honor valid withdrawals,” probably the exodus of the scammers is ushered in: Nobody can keep these operations from just grabbing the money and run. Even for a honorable business, it would be close to impossible to settle their accounts if the amount of disbursements is around tenth or hundreds of thousands of dollars to thousands of clients in just two weeks. 

This is a merchant’s shop where players can trade resources. Exchange-rates at such shops will vary duing the game, according to the productivity of the settlement to which the merchant belongs, and to just how well the merchant is familiar with the player. The exchange-rate of such “trade-quest” will be displayed after the trade-offer was picked up.
Since trades follow the same rules like all other quests, players can keep them on the backburner in their quest-roster for a while, possibly till they gathered more valuable resources to strike a favorable bargain. 

After reaching a certain achievement-level, characters can choose to obtain a new class of quests: temp-jobs. Such temp-jobs are picked up like normal quests, but they stay within your quest-roster for a longer time (remember, you can keep several quests on the backburner) – they remain in your roster until you decide to drop them again. As long as a temp-job is active, a character will earn money and experience based on the job-type. For example, a guard on patrol will earn additional money and experience by defeating cursed monsters. Other exemplary temp-jobs are archeologist, merchant or bandit (sic!).

While this is a great opportunity to boost earnings for reccuring tasks, temp-jobs have a downside, too: they occupy your quest-roster – probably when you like to pick up new important quests.

In fact, the quest for building up your own settlement is just a temp-job, too. After picking up such a settler’s job, characters earn additional money and experience for expanding their own village.

Around christmas-time articles about the popular Chinese MMORPG 征途 Zhengtu Online circulated on Chinese websites (they supposingly got a userbase of several million, and a net income of US $39 million in Q3, 2007). The issue didn’t seemed to be all that interesting at that moment, but it reached several large US-blogs like Kotaku around new year, and thus was getting more and more coverage in the past days. Before leaving comments scattered here and there, we can also discuss the issue here, right?
The original article by Cao Yunwu – which is quite positively received in the western blogosphere (Worlds in Motion: “absolutely fasinating”, Kotaku: “it’s a really, really great article") – featured a critical report about how players of ZT Online were taken to the cleaner’s by its business-model. It raised some hubaloo, but only after it was wiped from the Internet suddenly, making people wonder if this was all a publicity-stunt by ZT Online’s company Giant Interactive.

Go read the article “Gambling your life away in ZT Online” yourself to get the full picture, Danwei has an english transcription. 

While the article is intriguing and – besides being a bit lengthy – quite absorbing, it uses a cheap trick to build up its enthralling atmosphere: it consecutively uses the term “The System” (which is also its original headline) as a way to describe the game and its controls:

“In China’s hottest online game right now, players encounter a “system” that executes a seductive control. Though unseen, this “system” is omnipresent. It a virtual yet real monopolist. “Not a leaf moves in this kingdom if I don’t know about it.” The voice of Pinochet, former dictator of Chile, echoes softly though this virtual world.”

This technique builds up images of a faceless orwellian ...well… system, controlling all of its members in ZT Online and their wellbeing and freedom of speech. If you cut to the chase, the whole report is about power-gamers, who are paying through their noses in their arms’ race by Giant Interactive’s business-model for ZT Online. It’s important to use the term business-model here: Gamers like Lu “The Queen” Yang are not engulfed by the Matrix or something similar. They chose to play a game with a specific business-model, on a market with plenty of competition and choices – both Western and Asian (even if Southern Weekend (南方周末), a popular tabloid in China puts it in a somewhat xenophobic reaction: “‘Chinese gamers are an unwelcome species on European and American servers,’ said a game manager who once worked on World of Warcraft… For those ‘pedantic’ European and American gamers, Chinese players are like fearsome pagans. ‘European and American games do not encourage unlimited superiority of power; they put more of an emphasis on balance and cooperative support.’”).

The whole coverage pinpoints one important issue though: nowadays, the majority of massive online worlds declare themselves as “free to play”, even though you eventually find out in the end, that without spending additional money, the game keeps you at the status of an expandable decorative extra for the premium members around you.
Just to make it clear: when we are talking about Coobico is going to be free, we are not talking about that free, we mean the other free, like in “free of charge”.