Friday 27 September 2013

Random Ramblings #6

Ladies... Gentlemen... It's that show you've all been waiting for... THE RANDOM RAMBLINGS ARE BACK! This time, we have a real spread of news to go through, so let's jump right into it.

Werster's Pokemon Yellow World Record

I happened to be in the stream for Werster's new Pokemon Yellow world record run. The tension toward the end was amazing to feel, and the stream chat was awesome to be a part of. His new record is 1 hour 55 minutes with a pretty average start. The RNG toward the end of the run was amazing, along with one particular moment where Werster looks at his notes and says I'm going to be on 3hp and it happened. Absolutely amazing run Werster. You deserve it.

As a small side note, if you watch the WR run on YouTube, there is a part where Werster says "OH TETRIS!" That was me subscribing to his channel. I did not expect that reaction from him haha.

GTA 5

And damn. The hype got me hard with this one. I got a copy of GTA V for my 360, and have been playing it a fair bit. The game is amazing, and truth be told I'm actually liking the story so far in this one. Most GTA games are pretty story heavy, but it's usually not that gripping and you can literally blast through the cut scenes without feeling like you missed that much. In this one however, I am actually wanting to watch the story unfold.

The world itself is awesome, and the idea to have a section of rugged mountain landscape has me just looking for ways to do tricks and fun things there. There are a few things that bug me, but they are minor and purely just because of my background with dirt bikes (the dirt bike handles nothing like a dirt bike when on dirt). The gun play is pretty good, and customizing weapons adds a nice touch. The fact that I can add suppressors to the guns makes me happy, as I can stealth around if the urge takes me.

And that concludes this edition of Random Ramblings. As always folks:

GAME ON!

Friday 13 September 2013

[Insert Game Here] is Dying!

What a crazy week it's been in the Eve world. CCP recently changed their ToS agreement and the entire player base went crazy. Essentially a small change seemed to outlaw nearly all scamming in the game, spurred on by a particularly well thought out scam involving EVElopedia (specifically the Chribba page). But this isn't what I want to write about today. I'm more interested in the fallout from it, particularly the crowd of people who always scream "EVE IS DYING" whenever something like this comes up.

Whenever an MMO receives a change, there is always a small, very vocal but misguided group who assume the worst and shout to the hills that the game is dying; that the change is the signal of the end of the game. As Eve is the MMO I have spent the most time on, I have gotten used to the Eve is dying cries once every six months or so (usually in between expansions). Recently it became apparent to me that despite it's amazing successes, even WoW isn't immune to such claims.

It's no secret that WoW has been bleeding subscriptions for a while now. They recently announced that they had lost 5 million subscribers since Wrath of the Lich King, more than most MMO's have ever had. But rather than assuming that WoW is dying, look at it from another perspective. When WoW was released, I was in school. Almost all of my friends in school played it. However now they are all working full time jobs, have families and responsibilities. The circumstances that allowed them to play WoW have changed and many have had to quit the game. Still others that I know who played, were invested in the Warcraft story line. With Arthus dead, they see no reason to continue, as the bad guy they knew from WCIII has been dealt with. WoW also had the draw of friends playing together. If one or two of that group quits and they want to continue to play together, they are all going to move on to another game. As it stands WoW is still the most successful MMO ever made, and MoP has brought new players into the game (like me).

Eve on the other hand has been growing slowly for ten years. This year it hit 500,000 subscribers, a far shot from WoW's record of 12 million subscribers, but Eve inspires a loyalty among its players that has to be experienced to believe. Also looking at the stats for Eve's peak concurrent users shows that Eve is growing slowly with the number of people online. If anything, Eve isn't dying, its growing.

So why do people constantly jump on the "X is dying" bandwagon? In my opinion, it's all about resistance to change. People see something that they aren't used to, or expecting, and they immediately want to shout about it. When LFR was announced, there were people shouting about how Blizzard was catering to casuals and this would be the death of WoW. The reality? LFR didn't affect anyone who was already raiding in a normal or heroic group. Sure it can be full of people going AFK, but you will get that in any unorganized group in any game. When Eve's safety system was implemented, people assumed this would signal the death of highsec ganking. This hasn't happened yet.

Perhaps one day the gaming community will grow up enough to actually accept change without screaming immediately that the game is dying (unless it actually is, and they can present hard evidence of this). Until then, when you see someone crying that a game is dying, ask them to prove it. I guarantee watching them struggle to find how they can prove it will be entertaining, if nothing else.

As always guys,

GAME ON! And to the idiots who think Eve is dying, can I have your stuff?