Now don’t get me wrong, I realize that account sharing definitely happens around launch of any particular expansion. But that is mostly for people racing characters to get to the latest top level. This is generally temporary, and the account sharing generally goes away once done.

I also think there is another type of player you see dual accounts on, and that is gold farmers. Now think about this people. At first I can understand that people will likely think of this as a reason NOT to do dual accounts. However, one thing gold farmers are is efficient. They have characters online and playing 24/7 because they are scheduling them correctly. What this does is it lowers cost while increasing productivity. I agree that gold farming shouldn’t exist (have said so before), but while they are there we should certainly learn tricks that they do because they are masters at doing it well.

All that being said, for the average player and account that is actually playing. You don’t see much dual playing outside of rare occasion. Maybe we should. There are several benefits to doing it.

First of all, no one can deny the immense amount of time that an MMORPG can take to really do well at. This is especially true if you have your heart set on raiding. And we don’t have the time. Generally these games get dominated by those people who have a lot of time, this often is college and high school students, or independently wealthy. Most people not in this category get left behind very quickly. We have jobs, and family, and just general recreation time not associated with the computer that we want to do, but when we are playing MMOs, we want to be just as effective.

If you want to be even a somewhat effective raider there are many things you need. And a lot of these things result in doing raid after raid, instance after instance, time and time again. Just to get to be the best that you can. They take high level crafters, and much time running around doing the best fights, finding the best kills, etc. To get where you need to go.

Second, sharing an account with someone else can help spread the cost of an MMO around. Now currently, this isn’t a huge deal. Games usually cost less than $15 a month, especially if you buy a subscription for a year or so. And if you are lucky enough to have a game like Champions Online that offers life time subscriptions, it is only a one time cost. However, there are more costs to MMOs, especially these days. For one, there is usually at least 1 expansion with MMOs, and the initial box cost. The beauty of sharing here is only person has to buy, the rest can upgrade automatically because it is per account, not computer. Second, now adays MMOs are trying to find more and more ways to milk the consumers. Most games are now starting to give you the option of buying potions for xp boosts, and other goodies, and even at a bare minimum, it costs money to move servers, and it isn’t uncommon for raiders to move servers in order to find the optimum guild.

But even without all the bells and whistles, everyone has times where they are having financial difficulties. Right now I am having such a hard time financially that even if I want to spend $15 a month on an MMO, I just can’t. So I would leave a game right now if I were into one. If I was the main healer for a raiding guild, this would be devastating (I realize that many raiding guilds will also help out financially to keep their best players, but this isn’t always the case).

The last reason that I can think would be good reason for people to share accounts in online games is that people just naturally play at different times. Personally, I would be able to play most daytimes on Fridays, and then a couple night times and every other weekend. This isn’t good for the average raiding guild which generally will require raiding 4-5 times a week. Think, if you could get 2-3 people to split that 4-5 times a week, it wouldn’t be a huge deal would it? Plus then hopefully you can get people who also just play different times. Like personally, I have a friend who is from New Zealand. That means while I am sleeping, she could play and get better loot and more money. And then she goes to bed and I take my turn. The more players you have, the less time you have to have a competent account.

There is a negative side to this idea however….

First, people like to be themselves. When you are in a group account, you really tend to get a group mentality. This isn’t a problem in Travian, but in an MMO, where it is far more social and you tend to get to know people, it is a bigger problem I think. You want to be you, not someone else. And when an account has a multiple-personality disorder it is hard to be you, and other people get confused as well.

The biggest area I see this being an issue in is hotbar set up. I have a friend in EQ2 who is a healer, I was a healer in EQ2. I’ve logged into her account before… I had no idea how to do anything. She had a certain way things needed to be set up, and I have a certain way things need to be set up to work. This would be a huge obstacle with several people on the account. For me, I don’t see it as a huge deal. I have the Nostromo Game Pad and I could set up that how I want regardless of how the hotbar is set up.

Another problem is personal information. Travian actually has a fairly hands off approach on personal info. The account has an email associated with it but that is about it. When I log into my EQ2 account info, I see my real name, my address, my email address, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of games also had telephone numbers. These are things that I am not going to want just anyone to see. Am also pretty sure that anyone who is logged into my account can charge things with my credit card without my authorization. This is a huge pitfall and I wish they’d cover this aspect a little more for the games. Most people aren’t going to want others to know this, I don’t. Basically I’d only let this stuff go if the person already knew it and there aren’t many MMO players I feel comfy with it, even my close friends don’t have address. There is no iffs ands or buts, you would have to trust the person a great deal.

Forth is playstyles. Not every person out there can be a good healer. I do think there is natural talent for some class types, some classes I think anyone can do but some take some skill. So having 3 people on one account means you have 3 differing skillsets. I mean Player A may be a great healer, but then you will also have to deal with Player B who is above average and Player C who is utter crap. Trying to get 3 good healers on the same account playing a similar way may be really difficult. I think to some degree there is practice. I feel I was a very good healer, a very good tank, a slightly above average mage, and a below average scout. But I think the second two could have gotten better with practice. And obviously there would be a benefit of sharing an account in each player would be sharing secrets to make all three better (this may not naturally happen any other way).

Lastly is the legality of it within a game. I don’t particularly know how a game would handle it. I don’t know if they’d mind or not. I’m sure some mind, am sure some are ok with it. They don’t mind people having multiple accounts (because they get more money) but would the mind multiple people?

Even with the pitfalls, I do think that account sharing is probably a good thing if you want to be a raider, and i do, I just don’t have the time, and for now money. I think there are a lot of people out there like that, in fact I think this is why WoW became as popular as it did. It gave people who didn’t have the time to be hardcore players, the ability to do a lot of stuff without the time investment that other MMORPGs had. But maybe if people teamed up to share accounts people could be more serious players on more serious games.

I guess the only question that remains is… Would you dual with me?

#3) Ruby/Sapphire – I don’t know why but this version just never really did it for me. Looking over the pokemon that were in R&S, I can’t really say I like many of them. I mean there were some very interesting combinations of pokemon, and some interesting ideas. But the pokemon themselves seemed lackluster and I think this was the main problem. This game did add abilities, natures and double battles, all of which were great additions to the game, but weren’t huge in their own right. It also was the first to add contests, but I never much cared for the contests. The game also took out day/night which was previously in Gold & Silver. I also think R&S had one of the bigger upgrades in graphics to date which may be why so little else was added, but weren’t enough to take it off the ground. Overall I think the lackluster pokémon was what did it in for me.

#2) Diamond/Pearl – This one struck a cord with me on the opposite way of RS. I just loved DP through and through. In fact it was a very difficult choice for me not to make it #1. The pokemon themselves hit more to what I wanted, absolutely loved the starters, and other ones like Chatot (one of my favorite birds) and the two dragon legendaries were pretty cool. Oddly, I don’t feel that DP actually added a lot of new features. The main feature I can think of is the online trading of pokemon which is brilliant considering you can trade Japanese people and get Japanese named Pokemon and visa versa. It also added an Underground where you could do a couple side quests, and really it seemed make money was the other main function, could have done without it overall.What DP did right though was to refine what was done previously and really make a complete pokemon experience. It didn’t need to have a ton of new features, it just needed to bring together what was done before. So it had everything that was done before, just done a little better.

#1) Silver & Gold – This game was the first in a lot of ways and really paved the way that Pokémon was seen from then on out. It added breeding, pokegear to help you find everything you need to faster (and also allowed you to re-battle former trainers from time to time), pocketed bags, specialty pokeballs, two new types of pokemon, splitting special stat to special attack and special defense, day & night pokemon, and shiny pokemon.¹ All that AND it also included the entire Kanto region it as well. It is hard to say that this isn’t my favorite. I was clearly more than a little happy at the remake of this game in the DP graphics all things considered.

A Quick Glance at Black & White

The next in the series is to be Black and White. This is interesting in a number of ways, which I will surely have an article about in the future. First, it is the first base color since the original series (since being gems and metals). It is also oddly enough the first cover pokemon that both have the same type as the previous cover legendaries.² Lastly, it is the first version of pokemon that will be released on the same platform as the previous generation.³ I have a lot of hopes for this next version, but I guess I will do that in another blog because this one is already too lengthy.

Initially, I was obviously intrigued. I mean, this game was one I played for a few years for awhile, and still have some fond memories. I wasn’t happy with their Kunark expansion as it made it too similar to WoW and just didn’t have the depth anymore and left, but the concept of being able to return at no cost is one that I obviously would have an interest in. After looking into their new structure, I am a bit torn though. Let’s run down the main differences between the main four tiers:

Bronze: Comes with only 2 character slots, access to 80 levels, 8 classes¹ 4 races, 20 quests, can’t send in game emails, up to adept skills, 2 bag slots, limited to 5 gold per level (wow), 0 Shared bank slots, restricted access to the broker (not sure how), can’t create a guild, and can only /say, /tell, /guild or /group chat with people.

Silver: This is an upgrade that costs $10, one time only. Pretty much the same as Bronze, except you get access to 3 character slots, Expert skills/spells, 3 bag slots, 20 gold per level, 2 shared bank slots, 40 quests, unlimited chat, and can create guilds.

Gold: Supposedly this is the standard that people already pay for, it is $15 a month and for that you get: access to all classes, 7 character slots, access to all spell/skill tiers and items, 6 bag slots, unlimited gold, can send in-game email, 8 shared bank slots, 75 quests, unlimited broker usage, and then obviously all upgrades from silver.

Platinum: The new upper tier costs $200 a year. ² Unlimited access to races, get a free copy Sentinel’s Fate³, and 10 character slots.

So that is it. Now in all this, there is one very important thing to notice in the various plans… the standard plan is actually being gimped in order to give more benefit to the Platinum plan. Namely, you will lose access to all but 4 of the player races, the remaining races that you know and love, you must now purchase separately. I suppose this isn’t entirely terrible… I mean you only need to make the purchase once, there are many races I’ve had no interest in playing either. For instance, I don’t think I’ve ever considered playing a Ratonga. But one question I have is how does this affect people who already have made that choice in their characters? Would you not get access to those anymore? Currently it looks like the 4 races you get access to are Barbarian, Erudite, Half-Elf and Human. This is quite the limitation in the game if you ask me. Heck I think you should have least gotten half of the races by paying $15 a month. Also how is this affected by races which are promoted with the expansions such as the Fae or the Sarnak, shouldn’t those be just part of buying the expansion at the least?

Secondly, if you do decide to downgrade your account from Gold to the free account, say because you are going through financial hardship, how does that work with characters? I have a feeling this process isn’t going to work smoothly at all. In fact, in the beta, if you get the Extended client, you don’t even have the choice of using your existing account at all. So my guess is, you cancel your old account, and then you can have the free account and start all over. You don’t get to choose which 2 characters you keep, or even have them randomly selected for you. This kind of sucks for established players.

Overall, I think their extended idea is terrible if you are an existing player. For the same price, you essentially got a worse account. If you left the game and may want to play for it, you just don’t want to pay for it, this might not be a terrible thing, and for that reason may be decent for existing players. After all, more people on means more people to play with. I am considering playing now for free, though I will probably shell out the $10 for the upgraded silver. No reason not to.

Either way, neither account would be very good for anyone who even remotely wants to raid or even go through some of the better instances. Although, I do think I remember awhile ago hearing that SOE was planning on putting in scaling raids and instances so that a weaker group could go through with lesser rewards just to be able to play the content so maybe it isn’t even that huge a deal.

I do think the whole thing should be interesting to see play out. I think making the Gold account less worthwhile is a huge mistake, and I have a feeling they will lose customers over it. I don’t think the game can really afford to lose more. Maybe they feel that the amount they gain from the free accounts will overpower what they lose. But I don’t think that particular idea worked well for SOE with Star Wars Galaxies redo.

A good example of what I mean here can be seen in ecology. Yes, ecology. When Ultima Online was first put into beta, they had a virtual ecology going where you could actually endanger species by over hunting them. This was abandoned because it turned out that players didn’t care and over hunted animal life because they saw only the benefit, not the downside. That being said, even now there are varying degrees of a virtual ecology, even without it being complete.

Some games will just spawn a creature at set spawn points and that creature just stands around. There is no real thought to why the creature is there, just that it is there to fill a level need. I think this is best signified by Asheron’s Call and other older generation MMOs. Newer games generally get away from this a little, and at least introduce roaming where a creature will spawn and then roam around either on a set path or randomly through an area.¹ This particular level seems to be the norm in most games.

To take it a step further, some games may try to pretend to create more of an ecology by having both predator and prey in the same area, and even better they will have predator hunt and kill prey from time to time. This of course doesn’t effect the ecology other than one less prey, but it is still there to give the player some sort of belief.

This is the base idea, but can be extended to other things. For instance, just the idea of levels is gamey, and not particularly realistic. Unlocking is also a very popular thing to do in online games. Ever get an item with a level 57 requirement? Or need to get to level 30 to get in a dungeon? Heck, some games don’t even create an in game reason why you must first complete dungeon A in order to visit dungeon B. All these are gamey/non-realistic systems.

For items, I think the more realistic approach would be to say that everyone can use anything. So everyone could use that Uber Sword of Doom that you just found laying around. But if you aren’t trained to use swords at all and you decide to use it, that sword could very well hurt you as much as anyone else around you. Would certainly suck to find an awesome item only to decapitate yourself with it ten minutes later.

The point is made however, there is gamey, there is not gamey. I am full on in the not gamey. If I could figure out a fully realistic game, I would. To me, the more realistic the better. I want to create a full on world online that other people can have access to and live in. To me that is the holy grail of not only the genre, but also for video game development as a whole. Perhaps part of the reason that I feel so much animosity towards WoW is that this game goes on the reverse side of things. Blizzard was very much trying to make a game that was online with it. It very much is Diablo 2, just online. And I despise the thought.

But is there a time and place for gaminess in a virtual world?

For instance, creating a true Virtual Ecology may actually be a terrible idea for this point in MMO history. It is, at the very least, a programming nightmare. But at best may never work considering the play habits of the average MMORPG player. We can’t ask customers to change how they want to play. So realistically, it may actually be a better idea to simulate an ecology rather than give players a real one. Players won’t understand or appreciate a real one, and may in fact ruin their own fun if you give them one. Sure a simulated ecology may have ups (difficult as it may be to see). But simulation may a gamey solution may be better. That being said you should do your damnedest to try to make it as little gamey as possible.

The problem became that in order to bond, I wanted to keep my place near my daughter’s so that her and I were always exploring the same areas together and we could battle each other with similar level Pokémon together. Well this sucked for me because I was really excited to play SoulSilver again. So, I decided to dust off FireRed, which I never had even really played since I bought it. My thinking was, well since I playing the second edition, might as well re-visit the first as well.

This also has gotten me back into Diamond as well. Though, my involvement in Diamond hasn’t been anywhere near as high. I basically go in, see what is swarming, check on berries, collect an egg, get new berries, fight a couple high money trainers, get a ribbon and that’s it. I have been thinking of adding the Final Four fight to my routine too. I’m trying to level up a Ralts to get hypnosis so that I can breed a bunch of Ralts with Hypnosis and Mean Look (already bred that move into the Ralts) so that I can use him as a pokemon catcher.

If you haven’t noticed, there has been one odd consequence of this particular return to Pokemon. Namely, I’m paying more attention to the depth in the game. Previously, I had always just romped through the game, happily just putting one of each type in my party so that I had good combinations to beat any type of team. Facing a Water-type? I tend to put in Raichu and be done with it. However, now I sit down and am looking at the EVs¹ and IVs² of Pokemon.

So far, I’ve only been concentrating on IVs. My thought is that why should I bother paying attention to the EV I put into my pokemon if they don’t even have the proper IVs? So to start my expedition into getting “perfect” pokemon, or at the very least better than average pokemon, I decided I needed the right tools for the job. This meant that I needed to get Dittos. I need a ditto with at least a perfect IV in every stat so that I can breed that into other pokemon. Moreso, I also want to have a ditto with a nature that compliments that stat so that I can breed in appropriate natures as well as the stats themselves.

This led me to a capturing pokemon to do this. I started with the synchronize ability because it gives you a 50% chance that the pokemon you meet in the wild will have the same nature as the pokemon with synchronize if it is leading the party in Pokemon Diamond (and I assume SoulSilver as well). This led me to Natu, Abra, and Ralts lines as well as Espeon and Umbreon. Abra was my first choice because it was strong and i knew had some possible helpful abilities. But one thing I wanted in addition was Mean Look. Mean Look makes it so that your foe can’t escape and I thought this particular skill would be great for catching running pokemon that I still hadn’t caught such as Mesprit. This instantly took out Abra and Natu, neither really had that ability. Eventually I settled on Ralts because it could learn hypnosis later in its development which would help catch pokemon as well, and had a better speed than the Eevee evolutions.

So here I am breeding up Ralts with Mean Look and then leveling that Ralts to get Hypnosis. Once I have a male and female Ralts both with Mean Look and Hypnosis, I will start breeding those two together because this allows the born Ralts to have both from the start. At that point I will breed them until I have a ralts with each nature. I will then find ones that have strong IVs in Speed (and hopefully Defense and/or Special Defense) and then pump EVs into Speed and (special)Defense. This I feel will give me the best pokemon to be able to catch other types of pokémon that I want.

It is all very complicated really, and this is the reason that I really have been getting into Pokemon so much of late. I am finding that hidden depth to the game that people generally ignore in it. It is actually quite surprising to me how much depth this game actually has. Each step I turn I find a little more. First I look at breeding, which in and of itself has a ton of depth, this leads me to IVs, which leads me to EVs, and evolving, and weaknesses, and special vs. normal attacks/ defenses… There is a ton in this game besides the basic fire beats grass stuff that is easily discernible.

It makes me excited that there is a new Black and White version of the game coming up.

One of the more common requests from players has been to let them work the jobs. The new professions in Ambitions works much like the traveling did in World Adventures. You choose your job and then you are given little mini-missions based on your profession level.

For my first Sim I chose to be an architect as I thought that was a fairly interesting choice. EA pegged this profession as someone who could change the face of your town and I liked the idea of really changing the world I lived in. Quickly I find out that the profession isn’t with its importance. The job mostly consists of running around and putting in different furniture. You enter build mode in someone else’s house and get a check list of things that need to be bought. Doesn’t seem to matter what, where, or how. The only thing that matters is that you do it under budget and in a timely manner. I have yet to not get a standard bonus and have the person say it is ok. I have tried to match the sim’s style in the house but that doesn’t help with my pay, it’s just standard. Job to job doesn’t really change all that much. Basically the same thing every time except you do bedroom one time, study next, and gym the next. Same basic idea though.

Another issue is that you really don’t want to be using great ideas for house design on other people’s houses. So you really are just burning through the designs just to finish and move onto the next one. You certainly don’t want to spend an hour on this really terrific room only to never really see it again because it isn’t in your house.

From what I’ve heard in other professions, all the professions suffer from similar problems where the job is just overly repetitive and not worth doing most of the time. My roommate said she tried the Fireman career and found similar problems. She’d go from house to house clicking on random burning objects to put them out and done. She also was disappointed that when it came time to save someone’s life, she had little control over it and thus got little satisfaction. She had imagined it’d be similar to exploring dungeons in World Adventures but it really wasn’t.

I do still want to try out some of the other professions. I am particularly interested in the inventor and the ghost hunter which I think could be fairly interesting. However, I was very disappointed that they didn’t do the update with all the careers. I felt they missed a huge opportunity here. Instead of having work that you can do you basically have two different types of jobs to do. In fact, I thought it was rather awkward when you sit down with the paper and have to choose either “Find a career” or “Find a Profession” because they are so wildly different. Honestly I think I would have taken no new careers if it meant they just updated the ones they had to be more interactive.

Now I am left feeling they need an expansion to update old professions just to have some unity in the game. This is actually a fairly big problem with me. One of the issues I had in Sims 2 was the lack of expansions crossing. They would introduce a new concept in one and then never touch it again. I totally thought it’d be worth doing that they introduced a new vacation destination in future expansions that yes you could access without World Adventures but perhaps would be better if you had it. Sims 2 ended up with far too many panels because of this. I thought World Adventures did a great job of not introducing new functionality that wasn’t universal, but here it isn’t universal and I bet they never touch it again.

Of course, as with any expansion the professions aren’t the only new things in this expansion they have… ummm… well… maybe they didn’t really add much more than that. They did add laundry functionality so that you have to wash your clothes which is cute. It is optional, thank god, and only really seems to effect you if you buy a washer and dryer. But the last thing anyone really needs to do is another task such as laundry.

They also added some rather plain new items, nothing particularly special which I found amazing as World Adventures just had some astonishing items, but this one really did have rather lame basic things like a couch that looked like an every day couch. Nothing flashy, no sets or themes or anything, and really not even much. I’m still hoping that by going down the Architect line that I will somehow unlock some new stuff but I think I’m destined to be disappointed.

They also added a new town map which incorporates all the new places that they needed for Ambitions (like a junkyard for the inventor) and is generally a good map I must say. Though I have found that everyone in it is rich, and otherwise more of the same with some new styles and different layout. Isn’t exotic or anything. You aren’t going to feel much different here than the standard. But at least it was functionally usable unlike the one they offered for free on their website which didn’t have rocks or seeds to find throughout the map.

Lastly, and perhaps my favorite new feature of Sims 3: Ambitions is the addition of tattoos to character creator. It is pretty well fleshed out which i was impressed with. I loved it actually. You can choose where to put the tatoo in several positions (forearm, upper arm, shoulder, upper back, lower back, mid back, whole back, etc), change the size and color and rotation of the tattoo. Import your own design, or put a couple different ones on the same spot to get a new style. You could probably spend a ton of time on the tattoo alone. And I love tattoos so I love this new addition.

It is too bad that the tattoo is really the main reason to get this game. I kinda wish they added the functionality for $5 on their store. It certainly isn’t worth the full price of the expansion they usually do.

It was amazing how bad and incomplete this expansion was coming off of World Adventures. I get the feeling that WA didn’t sell nearly as well as they anticipated and EA slashed the budget of Ambitions and then rushed it out the door. Ambitions wasn’t even half the expansion that WA was and I think this is odd because a lot of the tech they used to allow players to do their professions was tech from World Adventures. Because they were re-using they really could have given players a ton of content here, but they didn’t. It was incomplete and buggy instead and just not worth the buy.

We have been to Devil’s Lake many times, it is one of our favorite parks to go to. The park is a big lake with no rivers or other lakes connecting it, so it is kind of a strange lake actually. It was created from the glaciers receding and it is surrounded by big bluffs. The water is generally clear, though I have noticed in recent years it hasn’t been quite as much as usual. Still, it is fairly clear for a lake and the park has many awesome trails going up the bluffs, and has vultures circling overhead as this is a summer roosting area for Turkey Vultures.

The one thing Devil’s Lake also has is people… lots and lots of people. It is a very heavily trafficked park by Illinois people. But it also tends to bring about lots of foreigners, I’ve never personally understood that honestly, but every time I go there are bound to be a bunch of different languages being spoken of tourists in bathing suits enjoying the area.

Because of the enormous amounts of people, it is often difficult to enjoy yourself. There would undoubtedly be someone right next to you smoking, or drinking, or being obnoxious in some fashion. And in the water was even less chance, often times standing room only, no real chance to swim or throw a frisbee or anything particularly fun.

The one thing about Devil’s Lake though is that there are two beaches. There is the North Shore and the South Shore. Well most people, us included, visit the North Shore. This is because it has easier access to the more leisurely trails, and has a nicer sandier beach. I think it tends to be easier to figure out how to get to as well. The South Shore however tends to be kind of rocky, but has a huge beach.

This time, we decided to bring some comfy lawn chairs that lay down and sit on the beach on the chairs so that we aren’t in the rocks. It turned out to be a wonderful idea, we spent the entire day there (about 6 hours). The beach was busy because it was a really hot day, but we didn’t feel stuffed in at all. We don’t even recall many smokers or even drunkards ruining it for everyone the way that we were used to on the North Shore.

We packed a picnic and moved into the grass under the shade of a giant tree and enjoyed that. It really was a nice little vacation and all for the low cost of a $7 day pass.¹ This averages out to be just a little more than $1/hour which considering there were 4 people cost us $0.29 per person per hour. A really nice sum. We did stop for ice cream on the way home but that wasn’t too expensive either. A worthy staycation I think.

The game at the time didn’t really seem to have much point. You farmed to get crop, sold it, farmed to get crop sold it, and every now and then you would break for a mini game or two. Well all that really hasn’t changed, however, I don’t know, maybe it is that there is more organization or knowledge amongst the players, but it seems to have more promise than it did before.

Specifically, it seems to me that because you know there are things to work towards and what those things are, you would be more willing to sit and deal with the early junk. For instance, I now know that on day 50 (which I recently passed) you get access to a large portion of the map that allows you to use stoves and wheat fields which give a 10% bonus to your efforts. Also having access to the map gets you access to more locations where NPCs spawns and it turns out that killing NPCs is a major source of experience, so I’ve been gaining more xp than I used to. Also at about day 35, you gain access to a second profession, so that you aren’t just farming anymore, you can bake or do something else as well.

In fact, this game largely seems to be of the variety where the longer you play, the more you do. You get access to cool baths and furniture, bigger and better beds which let you regenerate Occupation points faster, banks, gift shops and more. Certainly when I hit age 50, it became far more busy of a game than age 49. I think it is very strange and in drastic difference from Travian.

Travian actually has a really good first 30 – 60 days of the game. The first week goes rather slow due to lack of resources to really upgrade. They solved this to some extent however with the quests that they added that not only give you something to do, they give you resources to work with in this slow period. But after the first week, the game continuously picks up. The game is actually very addictive in the first few months…

Travians however is not addicting at all until the the first few months are over. When Travian is starting to slow down and get more boring, Travians is picking up and becoming worth playing. The problem is suffering the initial experience and getting to the meat of the game. I think this is why the game suffers and doesn’t gain many people. Most of the time when designing a game, you want to make a game that is at the very fun up front so that you bring people into the game but the designers of Travians failed on this utterly. They made a game that was fairly ok once you’ve sat there and tolerated it for a few months. This isn’t good for an on-line game however.

The developers have also been busy adding things over the course of the last two years, slowly but surely. Shortly after I came into the game again, they added a day/night function so that you can see night time. I also believe they have added an achievement portion to the game so that you get medals for doing various things in the game, like harvesting x amount of grain. They’ve added a few mini-games including Poker. Stationary for messages. I’m not sure if they added generations later, or if people just found out about it as it came. And of course they added more Diamond features.

The other real contention I had with it was that the game seemed like a big money grab by the developers. They wanted to get more money from their players than they ever had from Travian, and this point I feel remains true. Many of the nice furnitures costs money to get, and this I don’t actually mind. They have some furniture that is free so it is a luxury to get them. But honestly I wish that the furniture did something more than just look pretty for the money I spend on it. Baths and beds are one of the few functional pieces that actually cost real money. All baths cost at least a little money, beds are free unless you want say a double bed, that will cost money.

Besides furniture, you can just look at the list of things to buy in the features list and see that they really are trying to milk money out of their customers with this game. There is a list of 20 things to buy instead of 5.  And then there is redistributing Occuptional and Action Points in Travians, which I consider to be extremely similar to redistributing resources in Travian, a whopping 40 diamonds in Travians compared to the 3 in Travian. Now don’t get me wrong, I agree that it is a far bigger deal in Travians than Travian, but I still don’t see the value topping 10. In fact, if they did it at a value of say 6, I believe that people would use the feature a lot and they would probably make more money out of it overall.

I think that I can look down the list of diamond features that Travians offers and say that they are all a little overpriced. They aren’t bad things to pay money for the most part for, they just over did on the price for what you get. A lot of the other ones that may not be badly priced are just not described. Cheaper resources may be good but no idea what price cheaper is. It could be 1 copper less or it could be half price what you can get on the market. I think it is probably somewhere in between but who knows. I did buy a treasure map for 5 diamonds at one point just to see what I got, I got about 1.5 gold. I didn’t think this was worth the 5 diamonds and again, if they said “you get 1.5 gold” I probably wouldn’t have done it, especially since it still took me like 10 minutes to get the exact right spot for the treasure.

I do think the game can be pretty fun, but I think it is fairly sad that I benefited greatly from giving up on the game and coming back later. As it added 15 days to my life which really sped me through the quests and gave me access to the stuff faster. First generation players seem to matter less if you don’t level fast so that isn’t a big deal. I would say for new people to go play the first week, and then to just stop playing for a week or two and come back. You’ll be happier with the game overall than if you tried to suffer through the slowness of the first couple of months.

Still, I do like the concept of magazines. I like actually paging through them, finding things I’ve not heard of before, and just perusing. There is something to it that the internet just can’t copy at all.

So when Best Buy decided to promote the new magazine by sending free copies of their first issue to their little gamer club members, I thought it was worth looking at. Because realistically, we do need more gaming magazines in this industry and too many recently have been going away. So it is nice that one is making a stab at it.

The first thing that struck me by the magazine was the lack of articles. @Gamer’s basic setup is like any other game magazine, there is a news section, reviews, and previews. There are no editorials or in depth articles or anything of the sort. About the closest you get to this is some letters to the editor which weren’t worth much except for the hilarious question of “I buy a magazine?” The news section is only a few pages, and half of the news on the pages seemed no more than previews.

The previews and the reviews were oddly very similar to each other. Each has a 4-5 paragraph description of the game, a section about what is good and what is bad and release information. The main difference is that the reviews have a section that details what is different between each platform and a score for the game. The reviews in particular are fairly disappointing because they don’t actually give opinions on the game, don’t tell you the good points or the bad points of the game really, don’t really speak much about the game except the company line.

The @Gamer in general seems more like an advertising platform than anything else. They basically take what the company gives them, put it on the pages, and then give what very well may be the average internet score for the games. They don’t give tips, articles, news, or in depth reviews of games.

@Gamer has a cover price of $5.99 per magazine and I gotta say this is quite a rip off. They advertise $145 in coupons within the issue, and this very well may be the only point of actually getting a copy for yourself. But even so you would need to plan on buying one of the games. I could totally see paging through a copy of the magazine, seeing a game you plan on buying with a $20 off coupon and then buying the magazine to save $15 off the game. There were only 8 coupons in this particular issue though and none of them interested me.

I don’t see any particular reason why anyone would want a copy of this magazine let alone a subscription. Too bad this was another blown opportunity. Considering the funding that Best Buy could give it, this could have been a really good opportunity.

So let’s disect the features. First with TV support. I think TV support has been one of the bigger features that people have wanted, hence constant battles to hack Hulu onto their television. I mean let’s face it Hulu is great in its own right, and why not put it on your television? At launch it seems sort of limited to Samsung TVs, but it seems they will be adding support for Playstation 3, XBox360 and Sony Blu-Ray Players in the future. However, I hope they also include Wii in the future as right now this feature doesn’t help me at all, and I am sure it doesn’t help many. I would rather they just figure out a way to let subscriber’s get to a feed that they can use anywhere they can get a feed.

Higher Resolution… Good… Can’t complain.

More episodes. This must be the biggest feature that people wanted. People have long been sick of only the latest 3 episodes. However, it doesn’t seem that they went all out. They only have done it with the new seasons and a select few number of previous shows. And looking at the list of shows that they will be making available… shows like Roswell, X-Files, and Heroes… I couldn’t help but notice a  similarity….

Netflix

Yes that is right, Netflix. The new stuff that they are adding, seems a lot like the old stuff that Netflix has. Netflix has actually been working quite hard to increase their library of movies and television shows in particular on their instant view feature. ¹

Netflix actually already has most of the backlog that Hulu Plus is offering, if not all. The main thing Netflix hasn’t gotten is current seasons but even that isn’t entirely safe from Netflix. I know the last couple of years Netflix had Heroes on their instant view the day after it aired and then for the rest of the season. I think they have tested this option with a few other shows as well, but am not entirely sure. The point is, this has already been tested on Netflix and the fact that Hulu Plus is now doing it, will actually give Netflix more leverage to do it with the likes of CBS and Showtime whom they already have a working relationship with.

That’s the other thing though, is that because Netflix has been working on it longer, they have a much bigger log of shows. They have most of Discovery Channel’s shows (which I love), they have South Park (which was huge when they made that deal and it is still in my queue too), and they have tons of cartoons (which is oddly missing out of Hulu). They also tend to get an occasional deal with Showtime to show some of their content which again is huge. Getting a paid cable company to show their stuff on your online viewing… I just hope this deal gives more leverage so that we get even more Showtime content.

Netflix also is way ahead of Hulu’s game in the devices bracket. It is already available on a number of Blu-Ray, DVD, and TV manufacturer’s boxes, and is on all three of the consoles. Personally, I already have Netflix on my Blu-Ray and my Wii, and if I wanted it I could probably put it on my cellphone too. But I don’t see much point in that.

The Hidden Feature

Hulu Plus has one extra feature that they aren’t really advertising at all. And that feature is Commercials!!!! Yay for commercials. That’s right, you don’t even lose the advertisements from Hulu when you pay to watch it. They literally are following the old TV model, they offer some stuff for free at a decent quality picture, then force you to pay for the same stuff plus slightly more at a slightly better quality, but change nothing else.

It is a little surprising to me because the one thing that almost all free internet services do when they start having subscription services for their content, is take out the ads. Yet Hulu has boldly decided to say they won’t. This actually cheapens the service to me. To me the very first thing they should take out is the commercials, and then once they do that they add additional features.

Cost Comparison

So what we have is you can Spend $9.99 a month for Hulu Plus which gives you slightly more shows than Hulu with advertisements, and a slightly better image quality. Netflix you pay $8.99 a month for a much bigger library of shows and movies, all without advertisements, AND you get hard copy DVDs every month as well, up to 1 out at a time. I don’t even see how Hulu is even remotely competing with this.

Honestly, I always thought that Netflix should offer a plan for $4.99 a month where you just get the instant view, I’d probably subscribe to it. If Hulu Plus had offered their services for $4.99 a month, I think there would be a real competition. But at $1 more a month and fewer features, I think that they are only going to be getting suckers who just really like Hulu and have never heard of Netflix (which is probably a small number).

At this point, I realize it looks like this is just a huge advertisement for Netflix, but I think it is worth pointing out that they aren’t on my list of advertisers. I have no affiliation with them at all. I just don’t want people to be suckered into Hulu Plus and want them to know there are better options out there. Plus I actually think Hulu was in a great position to put out a really good product, yet they didn’t. I wouldn’t mind if Hulu improved their service to provide real competition and improve the online video services all the way around. But as it is, Hulu isn’t even offering more of the same, their service is clearly worse in all respects.