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Profile: grimfall
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Usernamegrimfall
Rank: 77/100Rank: 77/100Rank: 77/100Rank: 77/100Rank: 77/100
Real Name 
RankHard Core Member
JoinedApril 25, 2007
GenderMale
Age36
LocationCopenhagen, Denmark
Last VisitMay 10, 2008
Post Count40
Biography 
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Latest Blog Entry - By the People for the People
From my blog If I Had a Virtual Hammer [grimfall]

I’ve been thinking about game design and getting a MMORPG created. It seems that it is almost impossible to get funding for a title from a publisher if your game diverges widely from the WoW template. This causes an inherent conflict between creative control, which is crucial to make a top game and the publisher who wants the game released quickly and a ‘safe bet’ so that they can reach their expected ROE.
 
So, how do you get around that problem?
 
One way is the way Blizzard and Bioware (before they sold out) were going about it. Get rich making some single player or network games and use that money to fund your MMO. Unfortunately that takes about 15 years, and I don’t want to wait that long. 38 Studios start up capital (I’m assuming) has come mostly from Curt Schilling’s personal fortune, but even they are tying themselves to venture capitalists and maybe a publisher down the line, which I think they’ll come to regret.
 
Some of the lower profile titles in production, such as Fallen Earth and Age of Armor look like they’re mostly privately funded, so I guess it is possible to make a game without a big round of funding, but I suspect they’ve got some seed capital somewhere and honestly, neither of those games in my opinion is going to become a major player in the industry.
 
So here is my idea: A publically owned game company. In brief, after some start-up capital, the company would raise additional funds by selling preferred non-voting stock to the public, namely to MMORPG fans, but to anyone who wanted to invest. The incentive to invest in this stock would be you get the coolness cache of owning part of a game company, and a certain level of stock holding would guarantee to be a beta tester and receive a free copy of the game. In addition, some out-sourceable work would be ‘exchanged’ for these same shares in the company with private contractors. If someone wanted to write ‘lore’ for the game, that could be traded for stock. Or if they wanted to create some 3D objects or do some animation (assuming they had the tools) again, they could submit that work, which would be reviewed and then stock would be rewarded if it was used in the game. There are a lot of talented people making custom content and personal MUD’s around, who don’t want to leave their careers or homes to join a game studio in Austin, TX, and I think this would appeal to many of them.
 
So what do you think? Plausible or not? Leave aside the legal and technical issues, as I am aware that there would be many of both, but I don’t foresee any being insurmountable.

Read more from my blog [grimfall]

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    • nice to remember: wow first bugs

    • I was playing WoW Sunday and my hunter died because my pet got rooted in the quary at the south end of the barrens.  People who think WoW is or ever was free of bugs don't have a lot of working grey matter between their ears.

      I think with the 'Go Live'  WoW the most annoying thing was waiting  for 5 minutes to zone into Ironforge by the auction house.  The auction house being broken half of the time, 9 months after launch was annoying too.

    • Posted: 5/08/08 4:30 PM
      Age of Conan
    • Confused at Loot System

    • Originally posted by Tyrone0706

      As of right now I am 3 hours into my download of the beta, hovering about 24%.

      My confusion lies in the PvP system, more specifically, with looting. I'm a firm proponent of the idea of open PvP looting. Obviously this joy lies in my bias of being a above average PvP player. I was known as one of the better mages on Ultima Online on my server for PvP, which I spent years of my life doing, and I moved onto WoW which I obtained the "amazing" 2k ratings in all brackets on my characters..however, my interest has recently died.

      So this is where I am, downloading the open beta to a new game hoping it will solve my next PvP "fix." My issue is that no matter where I look I cannot find a single bit of information regarding what you loot when you kill a player in open world PvP. I'd love to know if its much like the UO system, which I absolutely loved, or the more simplistic (in my opinion bad) style like WoW.

      If anyone has any information on this, or a link or what have you I'd love to know.

       

      Thanks much.

      Sounds like you're quite the griefer.

      Anyway, there's no open PVP in the IGN Beta Client.  The 'true beta' testers could probably fill you in on the open PVP systems, but sadly they're under the NDA still.

    • Posted: 5/05/08 5:20 PM
      Age of Conan
    • If this game is so terrible...

    • Originally posted by Shadus

       

      Originally posted by Slythe
      Don't get me wrong I'm still on the fence about buying AoC, but they clearly used fileplanet to promote their game.

       

      The honest truth is, there is a lot of good technical reasons for an open beta that increases the number of people in the game at one time by a large percentage. It simulates stress, it finds small bugs, and as far as data mining goes it's a goldmine. It also gives you time to find serious issues that might arise on launch day and resolve them with a patch before then. I've also found in my experience that it also seems to get more spelling errors and minor graphical glitches fixed than any other beta stage... so it's critical for polish reasons too.

      That being said, anyone who doesn't see that marketing also has their hand in having an open beta is out of their mind. It generates hype and mind share which is critical right before release.

      Open beta and stress tests are all about launch day really. There are slews of marketing AND technical reasons.

       Actually they aren't soliciting bug reports from the IGN beta testers.  They patched the large  beta client over the weekend, making some of the framerate issues better but introducing more 'stalling' at least for me.  Think I will give them another week then try it again.

    • Posted: 5/05/08 2:25 AM
      Age of Conan
    • Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning: Press Conference Coverage

    • Yes it's fun to have boiling oil poured on you.  Just like it would be fun as a seiger to squash someone with a catapult stone.  Those are some of the risks you would take if you were seiging or defending a castle in medieval days.

      Might as well say, 'is it fun to have someone punch a dagger into your kidneys?'.  That happes all the time in standard PVP games.  In PVP it's better to do unto then to be done  upon, but the risk of being done upon is what makes it exciting.

    • Posted: 5/04/08 3:47 AM
      General Discussion

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