--Rawr

Two posts in one day... amazing.

It looks like Flagship Studios is going under. That's pretty disappointing, considering who they are... that was Bill Roper's gig. However, I'm looking at a bunch of these "children of the Blizz" studios and noticing some trends.

( Trends? I like trends. )

--Rawr

So... one of the things I've noticed lately is that there's a rise in the buzz about Call of Duty 5, now that some details have been released. The first thing to note is that it is, once again, set back in World War 2. Again. The second thing to note is that there are a lot of players who are unhappy with that, because at least 10 million people all liked Call of Duty 4 enough to buy it. That's a hard act to follow for certain, and now people are getting up in arms and angry about it being a WW2 game.

What a lot of folks just don't seem to understand is where the studio begins and where the publisher ends. Let's look at a couple of things, in order to better understand the situation.

( Show me the money )

I got into a discussion this morning and talked a bit about what's currently causing the arena system to be exploited. I came up with a fairly simple solution, something that I think would solve most of the problems with the transformation of arena ability into commodity.

( We just want to be paid for our work )

So once again, I am reading what looks like yet another hardcore/casual player debate and I had an idea for a MMO Project. Specifically, the rollout of content for MMO players. The biggest problem from the beginning of the Burning Crusade was that, despite his name being everywhere, and his voice being everywhere, and his likeness being plastered on every single advertisement for the Burning Crusade, the quintessential Burning Crusade character (Illidan Stormrage, naturally) very rarely actually showed up to deal with the player. You sort of dealt with him through a couple of quests here and there, but he almost never really made his presence known. At the end, he's just a long and involved boss battle in the black temple for 25 hard core raiders. Keep in mind that, according to the current data at wowjutsu, 6.41% of all ranked guilds (EU + North America) have killed Illidan Stormrage. That's an awfully small number of people compared to the total they have playing. They've already stated in interviews that they wish to make the NEXT big lore figure more accessible to the general player.

That got me thinking.... (a dangerous pasttime, I know)

In this case, I will present: Rawrasaur's version of Wrath of the Lich King.

( Get on with it! )

So I've been told that there will be a lifetap nerf in the next wow patch, and a lot of people are up in arms about it. There's really not that much to get up in arms about; it's an extremely silly thing to lose sleep over.

It's actually pretty damn simple, and I can break it down into 4 succinct categories of effects it will have.

( The nerf bat didn't really hit that hard. )

I got to thinking about economics and MMOGs because of a post by one of the Nihilum raider guys. I don't like his logic and all, but it did lead me to a very interesting look at a study performed by an economist on monkeys.

Linkage here

--Rawr

He is very good at talking, and explains online gaming to normal people. Not gamers, normal people.

According to this article a while back, and this site, there's actually more people who quit WoW each month than have actually killed a single boss inside the Black Temple (high end WoW raiding instance).

That's an interesting thought, isn't it?