So, I never subscribed to Warhammer Online, despite my initial enthusiasm on the game. Here's the reasons I've been able to identify, in no particular order:

1) The apparently last minute decision to reduce XP gains slowed leveling so much that the XP grinding felt painful. Being able to level with PvP didn't help since my Squig Herder just wasn't an effective class for PvP.

2) None of my friends started to play the game, part simply due to lack of a Mac client. Also myself playing on a Mac, I totally hated having to reboot to XP and hence not having access to my regular browser bookmarks and IM buddies etc while playing. Starting each game session grinding my teeth on seeing the XP logo wasn't doing much good to the game's immersion.

3) The pre-Wrath mega-update came out roughly at the critical decision point, and suddenly made WoW fun again.

4) Having used to having a mount in WoW, the movement speed in WAR felt pretty darn slow. I missed a few quests in some places and running back between places took too much time, considering I'm a fairly casual player.

5) I'm a rules and numbers junkie, and part of my MMO experience is trying to optimize my character to my play style. I couldn't see the rules in WAR through the dressing and had access to very limited amount of equipment to try out, so I was missing this part of the game entirely. This combined with the fact that some of the Squig Herder abilities felt utterly pointless (such as the Squid Armor) just made me feel like a monkey triggering abilities with too little strategy. Jumping back to WoW being able to survive accidental pulls of seven mobs alone felt very liberating after spending hours very carefully pulling mobs one by one.

6) Last but definitely not least, GOA only put the credit card subscription capability live at the last minute before people had to subscribe to continue playing. Had it been there when I activated my account, I'd have entered my credit card number without hesitation. When they put it live later on, I didn't bother to go there to enter my details, and when I got an email saying my account is frozen, I just didn't bother. Whomever was responsible for the account system at GOA messed this up seriously, and probably cost them a ton of subscriptions.

The part of WAR I liked the most was the humor. The world is just brilliant. WoW's torture crap makes me queasy, while most of the content in WAR made me chuckle.

I supposed if Mythic put out a Mac client, I'd subscribe immediately. The rules have now been documented much better by the players, so I suppose I'd get the hang of the game much better at this point. And or course, Wrath has been out for long enough that the honeymoon is over.

I wonder what the code would look like that was developed with this mindset.



(From myconfinedspace.com)

If you're using Feedburner, you've maybe noticed they now prompt you to migrate to using a Google account. I did it last night and found the migration has a couple issues.

1) Feedburner re-scrapes any external feed data sources after the merge. You might have noticed my feed suddenly re-posted a couple photos from Flickr - this was FB crapping out.

2) Some of the feed settings are lost, and need to be re-enabled. Like, my feed suddenly stopped tracking individual item statistics. After re-enabling the setting, I noticed all historic data was lost for the item stats.

3) Site stats have disappeared, probably in favor of Google Analytics integration. However, the GA integration isn't live yet (or at least I can't find it).

So, the old wisdom of holding account migration until you're forced to do it would have served me better. Sigh.

Looking at my unread counts in my RSS reader, it looks to me the MMO-related blogging has slowed down in the last couple months. (Except for those pesky "links for xxx" posts which I very much dislike. Daring Fireball does those right, one item per link.) I'm following around 150 feeds and I can actually keep up with the stuff now. In the light of less material coming out to read, I'm glad the quality seems to have up, at least on some blogs. Right now, the blog to read about MMOs seems to be T=Machine.

Yesterday Adam posted a wicked good piece on his view on why Tabula Rasa failed. And if you haven't read his post on customer relationship management, from late December, that's definitely worth the read.

Eagerly waiting for the next piece.

I ordered a new SLR lens (the Canon EF 24-70 f/2.8, a supposedly sweet piece of glass) after having sold some of the other lenses I had. I received an email from UPS on Monday morning about the package having been sent, so I went to their package tracking site and subscribed to notifications on the package's progress towards me.

Now, I don't know if it's just me, but I'm finding getting the various reports about the package at least as exciting as questing in MMOs. :) There's a reward at the end when I'll get the shipment (On Time! Tomorrow!) but there's Exceptions on the way, like the most recent THE PACKAGE WAS MISSORTED AT THE HUB. IT HAS BEEN REROUTED TO THE CORRECT DESTINATION SITE.

I know I can't do anything about the package other than wait for the delivery notices, but for some odd reason that seems to be exciting enough that I'm obsessing over the package. Makes me wonder what the lesson here is in regards to building virtual excitement. Would sending virtual gifts and purchases be more exciting if the item was actually delivered to you in this trackable progressive manner, instead of immediately? It wouldn't work for stuff you need fast, buy maybe it'd make total sense as a storytelling element of rare, exclusive items.

Writing about Seriosity seems to be all the rage right now.

I bumped onto this on Matt's blog, and then noticed this long thread on Terra Nova. The thread is quite a hilarious read - I think Ted has committed a social suicide and will never stop being Mr Serio no matter whether Serios pick up or not. Makes me wonder if this can get any worse...

Update: Edward now retracted. Good move. I predict the Serio jokes will stop in about a year.

Ok, so Joi Ito blogged about Lawrence Lessig appearing in Colbert show, resulting in a ton of remixes of the show, some of which are funny.

Unfortunately Lawrence didn't have that good of a example about remixing in the show.

Microsoft to the rescue! Songsmith seems like a perfect tool for, well, something. At least for remixes. So someone took this, put it in Songsmith, resulting in what could be called the remix of all time.

The Songsmith ad had me in emotionally fragile state, so I certainly wasn't prepared for this remix.

Vili Lehdonvirta has published his excellent research paper on virtual good sales over at VERN. He identifies nine attributes for items that define metrics people are using to value the item, all of which make sense based on my knowledge on this area. Part of the research has been done in Habbo.

The couple things that are missing from this classification that spring to mind are:

• Versatility, or how many different types of application does the item have in your world, and
• Multiplicity, meaning whether it makes sense to own just one copy of this item, or does it's value increase if you own it in multiples

Anyway, I recommend you read the paper. There's still a couple more papers yet to come out from Vili this year, which are at least as interesting as this one. Can't wait for those to come out, too! :)