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by John Hoskin on Jul 04, 2008

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Welcome to the 864th Edition of Loading...

If you aren't reading this in your e-mail, you could be. Sign up. Are you looking for gaming news? Look no further for all of the headlines. General industry news, right down to game specific and forum thread feeds are all yours as part of Ten Ton Hammer's news syndication program. Enjoy!

Daily Column

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

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

World of Warcraft - 200 BPM Age of Conan - 129 BPM Lord of the Rings Online - 87 BPM EverQuest II - 63 BPM Vanguard - 62 BPM Guild Wars - 41 BPM Warhammer Online - 40 BPM Dungeon Runners - 31 BPM Tabula Rasa - 29 BPM EVE Online - 27 BPM

I've heard of Twitter, but I've never used it. Fortunately, Karen does and sent this along,

"Twitter is a social network at the very core, but it has a narrow specialty: it asks what you're doing at any given time throughout the day. We now have a Ten Ton Hammer Twitter that will allow other Twitter users to follow the top stories and interesting forum threads happening at our community. Here's the link: http://twitter.com/TenTonHammer!"

Jack Emmert, the Chief Creative Officer at Cryptic Studios posted an interesting 'dev blog' on the Champions Online site.

"I was inspired to write this short entry because we just got done with something internally that we'd never, never done before. We finished a zone and were just about to head into working on something new. But we felt that the zone needed some attention. Sure, QA had identified some bugs in it, but the zone did "work." But the one thing we weren't entirely sure about was whether the zone was fun.

So we shut down the Champions team for two weeks. And everyone played the game. Each person was required to play for at least an hour each day, and a goal for the whole team was set for at-home play hours. As a reward, if the team played for 600 total hours for the month of June, the company directors would hold a BBQ for them. As people played, we expected them to use an in-game tool to log bugs, comments, suggestions and criticisms." -- Jack Emmert

It has often been written that games developed by Blizzard are polished. They are also very well received by gamers. Every development studio understands that polish is important. The developers don't choose to ship unpolished games because they don't care about the players. They ship unpolished games because they can't afford to spend the money required to take a game to the level of polish that Blizzard does. The team at Blizzard has set the bar quite high. Unfortunately for their competitors that bar has become the level of expectation. "Just do it!", doesn't work in this industry. Good intentions aren't enough. It's like deciding that you are going to fulfill your fantasy of having sex in a carwash, only to end up ruining the church fundraiser.

Shutting down new production to polish one zone for two weeks is unheard of. Now, how many zones are there? Let's multiply that all by two weeks. Is it worth the wait? Will we all be traveling to the grocery store in our George Jetson flying car by then?

Many of us thought that civilian space travel might become reality before the Wrath of the Lich King beta, but no, Blizzard has delivered. You can opt-in to the WotLK beta now. Go on, what are you waiting for?

If you are waiting for Azeroth to be proven flat then your time has come! If you're awaiting a flood of decent game journalism then sit back down and get comfortable. This could be a long ride. Scott Jennings has more proof (Gaming Journalism is an Oxymoron) that nearly every site on the Internet that covers our industry is simply a micro-version of MySpace with a narrower focus. I joke about not using facts or grammar, but these other folks are serious. They even use the word 'serious' in their site's tagline. Scott wrote his blog entry on June 25th, so he wasn't privy to this beautiful piece of prose which went up on July 2nd claiming that because XFire shows that less of its users are playing Age of Conan that the game is dying.

Our own Pulse shows that people are less interested in AoC than they were over the last two months, but it hardly means that the game is dying. The site that Scott refers to his blog is another great example of a 'negative influence' site. It's a tractor-trailer load of teen angst with a gaming theme.

In other news, Ashley Cheng the production director of Fallout 3 has called Blizzard 'conservative' in its roll-out strategy with Starcraft 2 and Diablo III. By conservative he means successful.

If you create an incredible intellectual property (IP) and then produce sequels the players complain. If you create something that is new, breaking the molds of tried and true game mechanics the players complain. Developers produce sequels because the risk - reward is better. It's as simple as that.

Do tell. 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.

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[A big thanks to Phil Comeau for putting together the links and Real World News.]

7 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 66 in July! 1644 in 2008!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today

Blizzard WorldWide Invitational 2008