Nate Combs has again posted on Terra Nova about what makes rare minerals rare. Nate makes the very good point; that rare minerals are not as scarce as the name might suggest. It is well worth a read as his his personal “scratchpad”.
Disclosure: This page contains Amazon Affiliate links; as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Further information can be found in my disclaimer and privacy policy. I have been thinking about the economics of Online Games MMORPGs for some time. Most of my interest comes from writing my undergraduate dissertation which was more of an overview of the future of MMOGs than any specific focus. Lately, and most importantly with EVE Online, economics has shot into the public eye. ...
It is obviously the time of year for MMORPG betas at the moment, Wish 2 beta started on 1st January, City of Heros Europe started not long after and it looks like World of Warcraft Europe is on the horizon. It is very nice to see so many games taking the european market so seriously, games like Lineage II, CoH and WoW are going to mop up after SOE decided all european players would have to play on US servers. ...
Having issues today with power at work, yesterday we had a new generator installed, then we had a power cut… at least we know the generator will kick in, as long as we don’t mind waiting 15 seconds. Of course the computers, servers and all can’t cope with this. So we have ordered UPSs for all the computers in the Admin Block, hopefuly will get some for the servers too, you never know we might be able to have an up time longer than one week. ...
I have decided to take a break from EVE and MMOGs in general, I say I have decided… I can’t afford it at the moment so I havn’t got a huge choice in the matter. I did get a chance to play Guild Wars for a weekend last weekend, which was a huge amount of fun.. not strictly a MMOG but it feels pretty good, kind of a cross between Lineage II and Phantasy Star Online. ...
OK… so all of my old planetside chums have defected to this new MMORPG called EVE Online: The Second Genesis… so here I am writeing a dissertation about the future of MMOGs, thinking I wander what this game is all about… and I wish I could have a go just to see what it is like… so I did, got a 3 day trial of Dreeder (cheers matey) and started playing today… the tutorial was less than clear and I gave up after fiddeling trying to get it to work for a couple of hours, then I just spent some time mining stuff for seemingly no point oh well never mind… from what I see of the game so far it looks vast… there are a huge number of systems in the EVE universe and they all seem quite big in themselves. From a design perspective I imagine it is largely an illusion as there is little between each asteroid/station/planet and so on… the theory behind the game is very simple. However a huge amount of work has gone into the economy, which is a really good thing as it ads layers and layers of complexity to the game, anyway if you are interested in EVE take a look at this affilliate link you can then look round the website and if you sign up CCP (the makers of EVE) will give OC-PS.co.uk $7, which isnt bad at all. ...