Tiny Pirate

Had an idea for a web ring inside second life for games. And so I made it! It’s called GameRing and the SL Games Blog has a better description for it than I’ve come up with so far:

“Pirate Cotton, one of the devs behind DarkLife, is just getting started with a new gamer’s resource called GameRing. Similar to a webring, this is a listing of games that is accessed inworld. The idea is that each game in the ring hosts a GameRing information stand. Maybe you are at a place that needs teams and you are alone – by scrolling through the kiosk you find a game suitable for one player and think, “Hmmm… I never heard of that one – think I’ll give it a try.””

Hi there. I know it’s been a while (ok, 2 years or so), but DarkLife version 2 is up! YES! At last! The first Second Life MMORPG is back on its feet!

You can go and play on Istaria Prime and enjoy a small version of the content we’re preparing for you on Navora, which is now locked and closed down while we completely remodel the place. We’re very excited to show you the new game and I think you’ll all enjoy it. It’s had significant work on the code, and includes new features like:

News reports state that there will be a player-elected oversight body to watch CCP and be available to audit CCP operations in supporting EVE Online. It’s an interesting, unique idea and I hope that it works out. But despite this enlightened approach, it seems people in CCP still do not get why their players got so riled up recently. This is evidenced by a quote from an interview CCP dev Magnus Bergsson conducted:

Ten Ton Hammer: Ever since this story was released, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the reasoning behind a player base as large as Goonsquad willingly undermining the foundations of the company that created their game. Why would a group of people do that?

Magnus: They refuse to admit that they’re losing to another alliance, and the only explanation that they can figure out is that those guys are cheating. Not just that they’re cheating, but that they’re cheating in cooperation with employees at CCP. That seems to be the only logical explanation that they’re coming up with.

EVE Online’s developers, CCP, have produced a formal, written reply to the community about the recent accusations of developer collusion with players and other problems. Before I begin to nitpick I would like to applaud CCP for going to the effort and it’s a good start. Note, I say start. This is the second controversy to come from EVE Online, the first being referred to in an earlier post here and in many other places. They handled the first complaint so poorly back then that players are going to have a hard time swallowing what is a better effort by CCP to engage with the community.

There’s more developer controversy around EVE Online. An open letter to CCP has been penned by the SomethingAwful alliance, Goonswarm, where various claims of impropriety are put forward. Most troubling is the accusation in the letter of a direct coms line between a Band of Brothers (a large, powerful alliance) player and a developer, where the developer, on the player’s word, banned a member of the EVE Online customer service team.

Sadly, the Game SLave Wiki has died, and this time it’s not likely to come back. Johan tells me that the database has crashed and he’s been unable to repair it, and worse, the backups had been failing as well. It seems unlikely we’ll see it back. Meanwhile, you can try and keep up to date with games content in SL by reading the useful SL Games blog Onder Skall, Osprey Therian and Seeker Gray publish. It’s a good read!

I’ve been working on a video for EVE-Online for a couple of weeks. It’s a comedy music video set to the Electric Six tune “Gay Bar”. You can read about it on the EVE-Online forums, with links and replies from forumites: “Gay Bar – A Tribute to SirMolle”

• Now with a YouTube Link!

Today I logged in to DarkLife to see a disturbing message from the coder, Bram (aka. Mark Busch in game). The post describes how we’ve had $400us stolen from our main ‘account’ holding our cash in Second Life for the DarkLife game. Read the rest of this entry »

I feel there’s an echo in here! Again, we’re pushing to get DarkLife updated to the next version, with a complete rebuild of the sim in Second Life. This time we might be able to do it though, Bram has his code about right and Crash and Logan seem keen on getting things squared away. We have most of the art ready, and we have what looks to be a good contractor available should we need someone to do some emergency building or texturing.

Phew! Fingers crossed we’ll have something more to report, as well as the new web page, in the next couple of weeks.

DarkLife is currently looking for artists and builders to rebuild around 3/4 of the sim for the next version of DarkLife. I wrote up a post about our request for tenders and I hope we get a few quality submissions! I think the chance to get paid for the work and the great publicty it presents artists should be a good draw. DarkLife gets a lot of coverage out there in the world so the boost to ones portfolio should not be underestimated!

The ANZAC corporation is leaving Omist, a region in EVE Online. Most of us haven’t liked it much and it was always only going to be a temporary home. We’ve managed to secure a deal with Ascendant Frontier, a large alliance that controls our own home region of Paragon Soul, and so for many of us we’re returning ‘home’. We expect there will be some heavy PVP in the corporation’s future, Ascendant has a few enemies, but we’re not worried, we love a good bash! I made a poster to celebrate.

• Correction – Make that around $100,000us! **

  An EVE Online player recently was outed as having scammed the community of 790 billion isk (isk stands for Inter-Stellar Kredits). This works out at nearly $12,000us (you can pay for a month of EVE Online, $15us, for 100m isk). The player set up a ‘bank’ where other players would invest cash to be used on highly expensive but highly profitable building and market speculation. Whether or not the player started with good intentions is currently debated, but the end result was that the player simply walked of with hundreds of peoples isk. This is entirely legal in EVE, which is one of the reasons I really like the game. You do have to consider your actions carefully, there’s no one in game to hold your hand! You can read more about this over at EVE Network News (on their forums, Rumor Mill section, login required) and their podcast has a 15 minute ‘confession’ from the player involved. Very fun and interesting listening!

Tonight the Corporation I am in in EVE (ANZAC Alliance) got together to hunt and kill an enemy carrier. It died in around a minute, a great achievement for our corp and we achieved total surprise on our enemy. Click to check out a couple of photos of the carrier fight and the fleet!

I found this image the other day when I was surfing through my EVE screenshots directory. Must of been me and some chums heading off to a complex in EVE Online (EVE’s version of a dungeon). I thought it was quite a nice shot really and so I trimmed it up a bit and put it online. Enjoy!

There’s something about EVE Online which lends itself to making pretty EVE pictures. Consequently I’ve redone my sig (as I am flying a battleship now, and I made some protest posters. The posters are about the very high taxes the residents of Omist region pay to the ruling Lokta Vectra alliance. Taxes they pay for very little benefit as far as I can tell!

I’ve been putting a bit of time into PoxNora, a fun collectible, turn-based, tactical fantasy game for the PC. Right now it’s in open beta (go sign up and play!) and the small team behind it have done a fantastic job.

The core idea behind it is the player buys booster packs of ‘runes’ (like cards in Magic: The Gathering) and then by selecting twenty of these builds a deck to play against other people with. The game is played out on a small battlefield where your creature runes are moved around and spell runes are cast, effecting play.

‘Nora’, the power to cast your runes, is gathered at the start of each turn from your home ‘shrine’ and also from wild ‘nora fonts’ the players can capture. The battles usually last around 30 minutes and end up a lot of fun. Once the battle is over (won by destroying the enemy’s shrine), your creature runes get experience points to spend to upgrade stats and abilities.

While the game is in beta you can sign up and play with the basic free deck as well as spend $50 worth of credit on game boosters. From my play it would seem that you would need to spend around $40 to $50 when the game goes live (August) in order to have a competitive deck. That being said, the game will also allow you to trade runes, so you could spend less and trade to the sort of deck you want.

I encourage everyone to go have a look. It’s web and Java-based and very straight forward. Have a look at their Getting Started information and take it from there. Lets support independent developers working on neat games.

Last year the BBC reported that a gamer bought an island in the online world of Project Entropia for $26,500us. Three weeks ago a space station in Project Entropia reportedly sold for $100,000us. And while the press and online gaming gliterati marveled, one question sat unasked and unanswered. Was this all real?

A poster on the Battlefrontforum I frequent provided the answer. Some good Googling from him produced a link showing that Jon Jacobs, the purported purchaser of said space station, is in fact the US Spokesperson for Project Entropia. His role in working on Project Entropia includes:

US strategic relations as well as, business development, marketing and content acquisition

More curiously, the item itself was sold when the servers were down (the items get sold only when the station is up usually) and one poster comments others were ‘disappointed’ not to have had a chance to bid due to the server status. What’s more, $100,000? A nicely round, eye-catching, newsworthy number if you ask me…

Furthermore, you would think a company so flush with rich customers wouldn’t have to scratch for cash, yet Mind Ark, the developers seem to be doing just that with the Google Ads they have at the bottom of every forum post. Frankly, I smell a rat. A cunning rat, but a fish non the less.

I’ve been writing a Pirate themed After Action Report for the game Crusader Kings. It is, I would like to think, a humorous story built around the exploits of my Count and his family. Crusader Kings is a fun strategy game from Paradox Interactive which has the player controlling counties, duchies and kingdoms in medieval Europe. Check it out if you feel like some piratey goodness!

Mount and Blade is an amazing little independent roleplaying game being developed in Turkey. It’s got the usual roleplaying bits and pieces along with a fantastic combat system which sees you charging around on horseback lancing enemies and slashing down foes, all this along side a massive private army you can hire and manage. Very good! Go try the demo.

As I pack up bunches of stuff and go through old stuff before I move I discovered this, the Ultima Online first phase (I think) public beta CD. This can be blamed for a great many hours playing many online games since the glory-days of July 1997.



On the other hand, it also got me at least two jobs and a couple of job offers! Thanks UO!