Disposable income netherlands

MOP Patron Avaera has entreated us to debate the problems of pay-to-win and cosmetic gear, and indulge him we shall. “The idea that good MMOs will diligently avoid ‘pay-to-win’ item shops is almost universally accepted these days by both devs and players,” he posits. “However, I feel like this zealous insistence that only ‘cosmetic’ upgrades be allowed for purchase with real world currency is actually a fundamental misstep, and one of the clearest symptoms of what is deeply wrong with the direction of our virtual worlds. “It’s no coincidence that the gameplay systems considered sacrosanct from any sort of pay-or-play tradeoff are heavily skewed towards motivations that are often more popular amongst younger, male demographics – using Nick Yee’s categories I’d consider ‘combat/PvP upgrades’ to affect the competition, destruction, and challenge motivations most heavily. On the other hand, putting the most … [Read more...] about Massively Overthinking: Pay-to-win vs. cosmetics in MMOs and virtual worlds

I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that this past weekend was a strange one in the MMORPG community, when gamers across the wide expanse of MMO worlds came together to collectively mourn, fear, rage, and regroup after a day that shook the foundation of the genre. Daybreak, itself one of the founding studios of MMORPGs, finally admitted what many gamers already believed: that EverQuest Next, one of the few inbound classically inspired Western AAA MMORPGs and heir to the venerable EverQuest franchise, had been canceled after so many months of stalled development and media stonewalling. And just a few hours later, we confirmed reports that dozens upon dozens of WildStar’s developers had been unceremoniously sacked in the wake of the cancellation of the game’s Chinese launch, which we’d presumed was one of Carbine’s last hopes for shifting WildStar’s downward trajectory. Even now, rumors contradicting NCsoft’s … [Read more...] about Working As Intended: The fate of the MMORPG genre

There’s this particular template for covering MMORPGs on mainstream gaming websites that I cannot stand: the old “haha, MMOs are weird and old, let’s poke at them for our ironic amusement” article. Polygon ran a piece earlier this month that could’ve run the risk of falling into that trope but actually managed to raise good points instead of just taking a snobby dump on the whole genre – probably because the author actually likes MMOs in the first place. Taylor Cooke ponders why he didn’t feel the urge to return to World of Warcraft for Battle for Azeroth, in spite of still enjoying and even craving some content – like raiding – that just can’t compare in more instant-gratification titles like Warframe and Diablo III. In fact, he wonders whether it’s the genre that’s changed too much – or him. Is it that he’s getting old, aging out of MMOs? Or are MMOs simply failing to keep up with the rest of the … [Read more...] about The Daily Grind: Do you think you’ve aged out of MMOs?

In one of our earlier post we discussed 5 important Google products that will surely increase your blogging success now in the second part of that post we present you with 8 other incredible but less used products by bloggers that could change the entire game for you and put you in the elite list of bloggers. In our earlier post we discussed about Google Accounts, Google Groups, Google Profile, Gmail and the awesome Google Chrome. Let us continue the post starting with another superb product the Google Calendar. 1. Google Calendar 1. Create unlimited calendars which can be color coded to segment according to groups. 2. Calendars can be shared with individual groups and you have a granular control on who sees what in your calendar. 3. There are five options for viewing your calendar: a day, week month or five days at a time, or Agenda view. The default view is the weekly view. 4. Creating a calendar, assigning access rights, and color coding them is very easy and intuitive. From the … [Read more...] about 8 Google Products That Will Supercharge Your Blogging Effort

Finding the right resources while starting a WordPress blog which help ease out the technical and other difficulties from establishing a successful end product are not very often easy to find at a single place. There are various posts made around this topic, but the irony is that once a post it made, many other tools are announced in the market which are not easily available or accessible to the end users and in most of the cases they don’t even have the knowledge about it. Here in this post we have compiled a list of resources around most popular and essential blogging and successful online business management strategy. So lets begin with the niche finder segment which is one of the most essential and crucial to begin with. 1. Niche Finder: According to WikiPedia niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing. A niche website can be developed and promoted quickly to serve a unique and small target based customer base which is focused on raking … [Read more...] about Top Resources And Tools For Smart Bloggers