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The Pulse

You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the result is the Ten Ton Pulse (What is Pulse?).

Here's today's top 5 Pulse results:

  1. World of Warcraft
  2. Warhammer Online
  3. Lord of the Rings Online
  4. Age of Conan
  5. Tabula Rasa (UP 2)

Biggest Movers in the Top 20 today :

  1. Ultima Online (UP 9 to #7)
  2. Stargate Worlds (UP 11 to #12)
  3. Star Wars: The Old Republic (UP 7 to #5)

Loading... Daily

Loading... if it came to life, it would almost certainly have an orange mohawk.

Ten Ton Hammer ran its first ever live audio dev chat last night in Voon, and we're almost fully recovered from the experience. No fewer than 7 devs were on-hand from Mythic Entertainment including Exec. Producer Jeff Hickman, Associate Producers Josh Drescher and Mark Davis, Producer Jeff Skalski, Character Systems Producer Adam Gershowitz, Community Coordinator Andy Belford (who was nice enough to stick around and field a number of questions after the event concluded), Combat & Careers Team Lead Nate Levy, and C&C Designer DJ Larkin.

The highlights of the Call to Arms expansion (2 new melee DPS classes were the obvious starting point of the vooncast:

  • The Orc Choppa and the Dwarf Slayer (who JoBildo has paid homage to in his latest Gub & Begud comic - WAR players should especially appreciate the fact that their game has invaded a WoW comic).
  • Twisting Tower, a new RvR scenario which Adam Gershowitz went into greater detail about, noting its floating zigguratish Chaos characteristics and the multi-point capture format.
  • A series of live events from March through May. Josh Drescher noted that the he feels that the exclusive one-time nature of a live event really adds something to the bragging rights of veteran players. He also noted that the March event, "Bitter Rivals," will include a means of getting pre-access to the new classes!
  • The live events will culminate in Land of the Dead - an RvR gated dungeon that was clearly inspired by the high-water mark of many a Dark Age of Camelot players' experience, Darkness Falls. You can read more about all the live expansion features in our exclusive Call to Arms Q&A with Jeff Hickman posted this morning.

The new features for the new players and the old for the... more experienced players, and WAR veterans wanted to hear more about class balancing and fortress / keep siege fixes, a topic which the gents last night handled well. Mark Jacobs went into greater detail on ongoing fixes in this post.

Even though Mythic Entertainment sent a number of devs who handled even the toughest questions with ease, one important guest was missing: the one and only Paul Barnett. Fortunately Justin and Angie Webb took a camera along to check in on Paul and see what he was up to, and this was the result. If you know the theme song playing on the tele, you win at today's Loading... and have good taste.

All in all, we learned a lot last night, and an extra word of thanks to Mythic for being so gracious with the enveloping chaos that was our first dev chat ever. I believe we set a vooncast record, with Vivox raising the room cap to accommodate everyone - I think we peaked around 175 or so, which is up from our usual dozen. Unfortunately that particular change nuked the in-client recording, but we haven't given up hope yet that someway, somehow we'll get a recorded vooncast up for everyone to hear. In any case, live and learn, and at least three reporters will have their voice recorders running when Bioware stops by for a Loading... Live dev chat in a few weeks.

Have feedback about the event? Post it in the Loading... forum, or email me. Then have yourself a great weekend!


Shayalyn's Epic Thread of the Day

From our WoW: General Discussion Forum

Of gold buying and mice

I'm
not entirely sure what mice have to do with it, but huddscudd has a
controversial theory: he suggests that Blizzard supports the gold
selling industry by keeping in-game prices inflated so that
players have to invest either a great deal of time or real life
money in order to achieve success in World of Warcraft, thus keeping
them hooked on the game.

"Its simple," huddscudd says, "Blizzard knows that anyone willing to constantly use real
money to enhance their WoW experience is certainly going to keep
spending the 15 bucks a month to keep playing. If you have invested
real money outside the 15 bucks per month, its going to be much harder
for you to leave the game than if you have invested zero money. Just as
time is an investment, so is real money."

Does
China have Blizzard to directly thank for its booming real money
trading (RMT) market? Do they secretly want you to invest your
hard-earned cash so that you'll stay invested in their game? And, were
this true, would that make Blizzard's attempts to ban gold sellers and
botters from the game nothing more than a token effort? Step into our
WoW forum and let us know what you think.

=================================

Awesome Quote from the
Epic Thread
:


"I can attest how gold buying
will ruin WoW. I met a Chinese guy a while
ago and was introduced to the Chinese WoW. Since I can read some
Chinese, I started visiting Chinese WoW sites regularly (to improve my
Chinese at the same time) and learned it's a completely different game.
I was so fascinated by it that I did some 'research.' It's so messed up
though I don't even know where to begin. Let's see...
"

- khabalah
=================================



Do you have a favorite Epic Thread? Let
us know
!


5 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 126 in January! 126 in 2009!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today [Thanks Phil Comeau for links and Real World News]

Interviews

Community

Guides

Hot Content - Or, what I took a fancy to:

  1. WAR Call to Arms: The Slayer, Choppa, and Land of the Dead
  2. Goob & Begud: "The Latest Craze"
  3. Forever Fantasy: The Forgotten Realms MMOG Dream
  4. Dofus: Preview of the Search for Power
  5. Preview of Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn
  6. The Tabula Rasa Autopsy: What Makes Games Die?
  7. The Comic Book Guy: Comic Industry Talent in Gaming
  8. Ten Ton Turnip: Issue #6 - The Final Root
  9. NY ComicCon 2009 MMO Panel Schedule
  10. Geeked: "Racial Intolerance"

Real World News


Thanks for visiting the Ten Ton Hammer network!

-Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team



To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Warhammer 40,000: Storm of Vengeance Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

About The Author

Jeff joined the Ten Ton Hammer team in 2004 covering EverQuest II, and he's had his hands on just about every PC online and multiplayer game he could since.

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