Massively^™

The culminating event of the City of Heroes/City of Villains Meet n' Greet Friday night was a keynote presentation by the developers where they gave attendees a sneak peak into future content. We were hoping for a huge announcement of sorts, but instead received a couple small announcements.

Initially the Executive Producer for CoX, Brian Clayton, began by giving players their first look at the City Vault. These are the customizable web pages that will soon be available for every player and supergroup. There is a huge amount of information on these pages, and some in the audience seemed unhappy that all their enhancements and abilities would be viewable by their PvP opponents. Players were invited to come up to the stage and have their characters plugged into the database to see what their pages will look like.

Friday night as promised Jonathan Northwood and I traveled over to the Milpitas Dave and Busters for the first City of Heroes/City of Villains Bay Area Player Meet n' Greet. Winter has finally come to the bay area, and so the first stop after the ID check at the door was the coat check. From there we were able to see a long line of gamer types snaking down the hallway and knew that we were among friends.

The evening was even better than I expected to be. Normally I feel very uncomfortable at functions such as these, but last night, surrounded as I was by lovers of NCsoft games and an incredibly accessible dev team, I felt right at home. Each player that arrived got three raffle tickets along with their badge. The white one was good for a t-shirt at the end of the night, the blue for a chance at raffled off goodies. And then there was the red ticket: Every player that brought a picture of their character entered a raffle for the chance to have their character sketched by comic book savant David Nakayama. What I didn't realize when I heard about this prize, was that he would be drawing about 20 throughout the night. Indeed, David was still sketching when I stopped by to say hello at the end of the evening.

Have you been itching to add your own personal icon to your Massively comments but haven't had the time to create your own? Don't know even where to begin personalizing your icon? Well, you're in luck, because we here at Massively are all about making life easier for you, the reader. To that end we've put together a couple icons from today's top MMOs to get you started. To select a pre-made icon from the gallery below, simply download it to your desktop (right-click then save) and upload it to your profile.

For those of you interested in making your own icons, it's a fairly simple process. Open up your favorite graphic editor (Photoshop et. al.) and create an image that is 64 pixels wide and 64 pixels tall. I recommend working with a larger image and scaling it down, since the format is a little small to work with. Be sure to save it somewhere easy to find -- those buggers are little, and blend in easily with the wildlife ensconced on your hard drive -- and voila, you've got a personalized piece of iconography of your very own.

Ten Ton Hammer is reporting on a recent uproar on the Vanguard: Saga of Heroes forums surrounding many MMO players' least favorite subject: death. Few like to contemplate their own demise, and even those who do would agree that penalties for dying in an online game are annoying. The current controversy surrounds a certain Producer's Letter written by game producer Thom Terrazas wherein he mentioned the possibility of reducing the severity of the death penalties in Vanguard.

Now Dalmarus makes a valid point about all of this. Removing the loss of experience mechanic from death means removing the excitement. Essentially, the developers would be eliminating that extra thrill you get from tackling dangers and taking on challenges that might be a bit much for you; the thrill you get knowing you survived and saved your precious experience points. I would agree that a death penalty gives players a consequence, albeit a small one, for reckless actions in-game, and removing that penalty means changing the game experience for better or worse. My feeling is that the Vanguard team might be looking at their competition, titles like WoW, and noticing that the loss of experience might deter the casual player from sticking with the game. But then again, it doesn't deter Dalmarus, so should they really be worried?

Are you looking to pick up a new MMO but not sure which one to try? Or perhaps you're one of those people that simply doesn't get all the hullabaloo surrounding World of Warcraft. If you happen to be just this type of person, then Howstuffworks has the article for you. "How World of Warcraft Works" looks into the game from an outsider's perspective, and gives a brilliant overview of nearly every aspect of the game.

From player base to the guts behind the game, the article goes over the parts of the WoW phenomenon, including several references to our beloved NickYee of the Daedalus Project and his demographic research on WoW players. Granted a lot of the information may be basic, but I found that even as an avid WoW fan I learned some things I didn't know, or had at least temporarily forgotten. And really, it's great to see so much information about the game condensed into its simplest form.

Have you ever wondered what our super heroes would sound like if they spoke more like we do in game? Well, Kill Ten Rats has reminded us about an oldy-but-goody remix of the City of Villains trailer, leet-speak style. I'm not sure how I missed this one, but I am sure those of you who play CoX will get a kick out of this. Heck, those of you who have ever grouped in an instance in an MMO will get a kick out of this. Enjoy.

[via Kill Ten Rats]

Massive Online Gamer is looking to reward (or bribe, depending on how you look at it) their subscribers who are also fans of EQ2. The first one thousand people to purchase a subscription will have access to an exclusive in game item. Now there isn't much info on what the item actually is, although it looks like a combination between a shield and wall art, so either might be a possibility. Either way, who doesn't like free stuff?

A year subscription costs $16.99. It's really not that bad a price considering you get 6 issues of the magazine. Those interested can subscribe online.

West Karana recently posted an article that speculates on how you might translate EVE Online to the fantasy genre. As Tipa says, all the elements are already there in the game, you just have to find them. I particularly liked the analogy of a ship being akin to a hero's group of cohorts. While the hero's companions may die around him, he can still survive to fight other battles. In the same way, a ship in EVE is separate from its pilot and while the ship may be destroyed, the character itself may live on.

When you consider the basic elements that go into any good story, I think this analogy holds up pretty well. There is so much in a fantasy MMO that protects the hero from actual battle, in the same way that in EVE you are protected by your ship. A knight never goes into battle without his steed, his weapons, his armor, and more likely than not, his army. What do you think? How well would EVE work in a fantasy setting?

Poking around on the CoX forums this morning I came across an amazing little tool brought to us by the blossoming development community surfacing in the player base of the game. This fabulous bit of coding is called Splasher, and it's a program that allows you to customize the login and character selection screens for your client.

Beyond simply letting you put up a custom screenshot, the program includes a music function that will let you change the music played for you when the game loads. In this way you can create a custom anthem for your hero to serenade you while you select which character you would like to roam Paragon City with. In addition to the customizable music, there is also a randomizer function that will select a random custom login screen for you from a selection that you put into the program. I created a login screen that featured my favorite moments from Trick or Treating last month. You can download Splasher here, and soon you'll be on the road to a custom login of your very own.

It's awfully odd to be reporting about developers talking about game mechanics in Marvel Universe Online after we just let you know that there are rumors the game might never actually see the light of day. Personally, I take it as a sign of good faith that Geoff Tuffli of Cryptic Studios is discussing the challenges that arise when trying to create a PvP system in an MMO in his third article in a series of blogs about PvP considerations. Of course, at its core this is more of a philosophical discussion about MMOs in general than about the specific choices they are making with this particular project, but a girl can hope, right?

The first section of the article deals with the debate between persistent PvP environments versus instanced ones. With instances, such as in World of Warcraft battlegrounds, preselected teams can form up to battle in a controlled environment that includes quests, faction rewards, and tokens. On the other hand, a PvP system more like Dark Age of Camelot or Anarchy Online where the combat takes place in a more persistent environment allows players to build the ever-so-enjoyable guild grudge and fight over territory within the game. From reading through his article it looks like the Marvel Universe Online PvP system will lean more toward the persistent than the instanced, which is fine by me. As long as they actually let me play the game.

[via Warcry]