In MMORPG the term "nerf" has come to mean "diminishing the power of a virtual object or skill by the game developers". The devs aren't actually using nerf to replace your sword, but it well feels like it. Nerfs are always a result of a bad design decision. A developer designed a weapon, another item, or a character skill/power, and when the players actually use it, it turns out to be too powerful. So it gets nerfed, to balance the game. Two weeks ago I wrote of Horizons, that it is a game full of good ideas, marred by a bad graphics engine. Lineage 2 (L2) is just the opposite: The graphics engine is good, delivering crisp graphics without lag. But the game is full of bad ideas. The ultimate bad idea, and L2's claim to fame, is unrestricted PvP. You can attack your fellow players anywhere, at any time. That will give you bad karma, and you shouldn't do it right next to a guard. But the karma thing is easy to repair, the guards and blood pixies only protect a very small area, so if griefing and player killing is your thing, Lineage 2 is a paradise.

I've seen several different version of this flying around, Wrath of the Lich King "leaked" information from "data mining" an alpha client. But if you look at them a bit closer you will find old acquaintances like Titan's Grip, a warrior ability that allows two-handed weapons to be dual-wielded. That was a notorious part of a previous hoax "leak". So in my opinion all of this information flying around is fake, just created to make fun of the gullible. Don't believe anything you hear until there is at least an open beta. Hoaxers love to fake alpha information just because nobody has access to it, so it can't be verified. The only reliable information we have right now is that the alpha started on May 1st.

The game hasn't even started yet in Europe, and barely got out of the gate in the US, and already people report being bored. I'm not far enough to verify it myself, but apparently the content gets even weaker after level 30. Which is pretty much the state Lord of the Rings Online was in at release, so it wouldn't be all that surprising. As I said, I'm not there yet, but already I feel an urge to rather level up another class to 20 in Tortage with its fun destiny quest lines and voice overs, instead of doing random quests, randomly distributed all over Hyboria. Tortage has a lot of character, the wider world of Hyboria is lacking the world feeling for me.

There being no sense of place is not only a matter of transport, but also of quest organization. Whatever city you are in, the quests you get can lead you to adventuring zones which are nominally attached to other regions. I left Tortage at level 19 and went to Stygia, but ended up leveling to 22 mostly in Aquilonia. Pretty quickly you start thinking of zones not in terms as being north, west, south, or east, but in terms of being X jumps away from where you are. Now every region has their own zone for leveling up from 20 to 30. The advantage of being able to jump so quickly to any zone is that you end up with tons of quests for every level, more than you would need to level up. Don't like a quest? Just skip it, there are so many others around. The disadvantage is that you easily outlevel a zone before you have seen everything, and that by jumping around between zones you also jump around between the various strings of lore. You get less involved in a zone and its lore.

So my Herald of Xotl left Tortage and started questing all around Hyboria. But somehow "all around" is not really the good description. All the zones are instanced, and are accessed by talking to some NPC who teleports you there. It is simply not possible to walk into the next zone, you walk to the zone border where somebody teleports you into the next zone. Only that some teleports are all across the map, connecting the cities. You can reach a zone on the far end of the map as fast as the zone shown next to where you are on the world map. This has a horrible demotivating effect on me: I'm an explorer, and I'm missing a world to explore.

Brian Sutton-Smith and Marie-Laure Ryan were just here for Jesper's defense (which went quite well, he is now Dr. Juul!) and they both gave interesting talks. Sutton-Smith (who is much more lively and fun than came across with the DiGRA videoconference event) lectured on the nature of play. While he gives a fascinating historical account of the different ways play has been thought of he also, roughly speaking, proposes that play is what we do to deal with the fact that life can be miserable - it's a tough world, full of anxiety and disappointment, so we cope via play. It's a fascinating proposal and when he presents all kinds of engaging stories about children's play I find it hard to not buy it at least a little bit. But I've been thinking about this issue lately. We often hear how when we play we step inside a "magic circle" for the duration of the game, agreeing to a kind of fiction that is fairly distinct from our normal lives.

Increasing firm size makes sense, since this is a field where returns to scale are positive. The question is, how much bigger can IGE get? I doubt that item sales are likely to be monopolized, but there are clearly some gains to be made by streamlining operations and collecting similar functions (item farming, auction management, delivery, web updates) across many games. It would educate you – I'm not saying it's good or bad, but what does it say about the lives they're living nowadays? That they find it more interesting, and more stimulating, more "reassuring" in this other world. And if we are concerned about it, rather than just sacking people, or crying foul, or pulling the plug out, what we should be doing is exploring why it makes us unhappy, and how we can make real life better for people if ...indeed we find this a, this a problem.

So I'm still reading Richard's Book. On pp. 329-342, he talks about the physics of virtual worlds. One thing he makes clear (that we non-devs frequently forget) is how challenging it is to code reality in a way that bears any similarity to the physical world we all know and love. Virtual worlds are not made of atoms and molecules, but are generally assembled with discrete software "objects" (in the programming sense of that word) that interact with each other and have specific properties. Modeling reality by way of such objects poses some interesting challenges. As Richard says: Given that virtual objects are, on the whole, intended to exhibit behaviors at the physics level that are consitent with reality, it might be expected that there are common problems that recur whenever some particular aspect or other of reality is considered. This is indeed the case: Some facts of reality are easy to implement and others are downright impossible. So when you're modeling real objects, what's easy and what's impossible?

The brief damage immunity that players have when resurrecting at the shrine now protects against lifestealing effects.

For the first time ever, players will have the ability to hire non-player characters (NPCs) to aid them in their heroic endeavors in Seeds of Destruction. These mercenaries will be valuable player assets as they thwart the efforts of Discord's Dark God. This expansion also includes a level cap increase to 85, dynamic high-level raid content, new spells and updated alternate advancement abilities.