Loading... Fan Faires and Sauerkraut

Welcome to the 813th Edition of Loading...

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Daily Column

Loading... Flown in on the wings of angels (and gryphons).

First, the Ten Ton Pulse, your finger on the beating heart of the MMOG industry.

If the Top 10 isn't enough, we now show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)

Age of Conan - 200 BPM
World of Warcraft - 52 BPM
Lord of the Rings Online - 20 BPM
EverQuest 2 - 17 BPM
Lineage 2 - 16 BPM
EVE Online - 15 BPM
Warhammer Online - 12 BPM
Guild Wars - 12 BPM
Vanguard - 11 BPM
Pirates of the Burning Sea - 8 BPM

Welcome to your Tuesday Loading...

The 200 Age of Conan beta keys vanished faster than cupcakes at a Rosie O'Donnell friends and family party. All 200 keys disappeared in under five minutes. Give yourselves a pat on the back for once again proving that you are the #1 MMOG community on the planet. We will have 100 more at some point this week, but if you want larger numbers our hands are tied. Ellipsys, one of our loyal Premium Members has started a thread politely asking Funcom or Eidos for more keys and asking members to sign the letter if they too would like to like to receive their beta key through Ten Ton Hammer. It may not make any difference, but it can't hurt. Well done Ellipsys! I would hate to send the thousands of Loading... readers to post in a thread on the Official Forums, but desperate times call for desperate measures. You took down the Rosie O'Donnell website, you can do anything!

An excellent article covering the recent Age of Conan PvP weekend is up on our community site. If you weren't accepted into the beta and are curious about the PvP then this is your read for the morning. At Leipzig GC last year I watched Cody get taken apart by a teen who appeared to be an idiot savant when it came to PvP. This kid was literally the rainman of AoC PvP. He was slicing, dicing, rocking and rolling all over the rest of the players. Cody just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I told him that choosing the game pod right next to the caged Barbarian woman was a bad idea, but no... he had to use that particular machine. He was distracted half the time he was playing.

One many who never gets distracted is Byron, one of our illustrious World of Warcraft Community Managers. He put me on to an article at Comedy Central titled, Campaigning in the World of Warcraft. This is comedy gold. The candidates pros and cons are broken down by World of Warcraft class. Will Paladins vote for Obama? Comedy Central has the answer.

It's patch day for World of Warcraft and that means that players are either checking to see if their server is back up or they are crashing like a tsunami into our WoW Community site. Some bright light managed to get a list of "hidden" WoW servers, the ones that you don't normally get to see. It is an extensive list, but what caught my eye was.

* 1436 : USxy-BG. (12 Servers)
* 1448 : EUxy-BG-zz. (28 Servers)
* 1472 : KRxy-BG. (4 Servers)
* 1478 : TWxy-BG. (2 Servers)
* 1480 : CSBGx. (7 Servers)
* 1526 : QAx-BG. (2 Servers)
* 1528 : CNxy-BG. (16 Servers)
* 1639 : US Event Realm x. (5 Servers)
* 1644 : KR Event Realm x. (9 Servers)

If number of servers correlates to number of players then there are more Europeans playing WoW than North Americans, Koreans or Chinese. The number of European BG servers dwarfs the number in any other location. The Korean players love their arena though and have almost twice as many servers dedicated to that event as North Americans do.

If WoW isn't your thing, perhaps snagging a job working on EverQuest II would interest you. Lyndro has hung out a Help Wanted sign on the SoE website. You might even get to meet the developers if you decide to attend the SoE Fan Faire in Las Vegas. How many of you plan to make the voyage to the land that modesty forgot? It overlaps with Leipzig GC for us, so many of the Ten Ton Hammer team won't be attending. I expect that Coyote will be there, though RadarX may be in Germany with us, knee-deep in Bavarian brews and sauerkraut.

Fan Faire, Leipzig, PAX...are you attending any industry events this year? The The Loading... forums await you.

Do you feel the need to contact me personally with naughty pictures or derogatory comments? Here's my E-mail.

9 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 189 in April! 941 in 2008!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today

Ten Ton Hammer @ NY ComicCon 08