Lee Packham

I know there’s been a lot of videos of this before – but I wanted to explore it myself. While I did, I made a video using the inbuilt Mac options for video recording. I got there via the Gnome/Bank Vault/Auto-Unstuck trick.

More and more online gaming is breaking into mainstream media. This time, another EVE heist story.

One of the game’s biggest financial institutions lost a significant chunk of its deposits as a huge theft started a run on the bank.

One of the bank’s controllers stole about 200bn kredits and swapped them for real world cash of £3,115.

This is the first time I have then heard about it going on to be swapped out for real world cash however. It makes me wonder, how long did it take to achieve those winnings? Is it profitable?

He’s only been thrown out of the game as what he did was against the Terms and Conditions. There’s no, currently at least, real world comeback on this.

Ace.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Billions stolen in online robbery.

The guys at wowhead.com have posted their Christmas wallpaper with a load of Alliance eye candy. The only issue is… where’s the Horde eye candy?

A Christmas Present for You – The Wowhead Blog.

I’m an avid World of Warcraft player myself. I tried Conan and Warhammer this year… why did they fail? The Register gives some insight… not a very good insight… but an insight none the less!

How Warcraft reigned supreme in 2008 • The Register

Very VERY good news in the World of Vanguard:

Today I would like to formally announce that SOE has acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online, including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. As a part of this acquisition, we are bringing on approx 50 people from Sigil in order to insure that Vanguard continues to grow. SOE is dedicated to making sure that Vanguard is well taken care of and that we provide the same level of service we do for our other titles. In the near future we will come out with a publishing plan that will largely be driven by the strong player community that Vanguard has already built up. We plan on supporting Vanguard for many years to come, and you can expect many content updates as part of your subscription. Down the line we will of course be coming out with new expansion packs, but right now the focus is on making sure Vanguard is running the way it should be.

Link to SOE and Vanguard

From F13.net.

The axe finally fell. It was only a matter of time, I suppose. And while many of you may try to spin this to make SOE look bad, apparently this wasn’t really their doing. You see, SOE doesn’t own Sigil. It doesn’t own Sigil now and they won’t own them tomorrow. But they do own Vanguard. What fate awaits that game? I don’t know. Don’t particularly care either.

But I do know that at approximately 4:30PM today, Sigil employees were told to meet outside. At which point they were terminated. On the spot. By whom? Doesn’t seem to have been Brad McQuaid, if it was, nobody is talking. But that doesn’t seem like something he’d do. But I suppose the executioner is irrelevant since most folks secretly want it to be SOE and it wasn’t. As it stands, people were told to come back tomorrow to do their paperwork and some may get hired by SOE.

I contacted SOE since I’m not in the business of burning bridges or spinning news and they had this to say:

“…an announcement is forthcoming tomorrow.”

I managed to find a good post on the MMORPG forums that cover this very well (original forum topic):

1. The ablility to see what level people are via the chat (like in WoW were shift+click on the nick in chat), making LookingForFellowship shouts easier.
2. Zoom in/out of minimap.
3. Chat bubbles option…. Yeah I hated them at the start, but now I realise how great they are. Its hard having the pay attention in the chat window all the time, when the poor guy next to you is trying to talk to you.
4. Kinship filters/options. The Kinship window is a joke. I can’t filter out “just show online” players. I hate this, now if I short by name I get up every last member. This is annoying, since I am in a rather big Kinship and when people ask if they want to group up, I have to go through the whole list to find out what level they are (once again the shift+click ability in WoW is greatly missed).
5. Ask a guard as in Everquest 2. There you could type in a NPCs name and you were directed to were he/she is. Very helpful when looking for the person to cash in a quest too. Also asking for vendors and other NPC services.
6. Different colors on NPCs and Player names. As it is now, its a massive mess. I have to turn off the names just to find the person with the little “ring” over his/her head among the crowd.
7. Ignore player notes. Would be nice to be able to make a short note as to why next to the player. Aslo having the date as to when you ignored the person.
8. LFG. Well really “Looking for Fellowship, but you get the idea. DDO had an amazingly great LFG system, why they did not implement the same system in this game is beyond me. They have only taken part of it into LOTRO. I am missing the “looking for class” etc.
9. Crafting. The crafting here is bad. The idea is great. But “we” are too dipendint on other crafters to make parts needed. This is just making crafting a big BIG pain in the arse….this is the same aproch EQ2 had with lots of “parts” needed, but they also realised how a little too advanced it was and changed it. I do hope they change it in LOTRO as well.

The EverQuest II team have been busy chaps.

Later this month, we’ll be releasing the largest free content addition that EQ2 has ever seen. The complement to that experience: The city of Neriak, the large outdoor zone of Darklight Wood, and a new playable race, the Arasai, one of the races who will be able to start there.

These zones are another collaboration with our SOGA studio in Taiwan, the same studio that developed the characters and environments for The Fallen Dynasty. Their artists working in conjunction with our designers and artists have really brought Neriak back to life.

Excellent! Free content upgrade. Nice to see Sony Online Entertainment finally jump onto the bandwagon of free content.

I know i’ll be looking forward to it!

Link to EverQuest II Players

Interestingly, the Exec. Producer of Vanguard, Brad “Aradune” McQuaid has posted on the offical Vanguard support forums with details of what’s happeninga at Sigil.

SOE is in discussions with Sigil regarding the future of Vanguard and Sigil Games in Carlsbad.  Talks are going well and first and foremost, our primary concern right now is what’s best for Vanguard and its community.  We want to ensure that this game and its community have a healthy future.  The specifics that we work out over the coming days will all be with that single goal in mind.

This is interesing as there are stacks of rumours going around the Internet at the moment about the future of Vanguard.

In my opinion, it’s a really good game. I’ve been playing it over the last week. The servers have taken a hit from the Lord of the Rings effect. But that’s fine. They’ll all come back when they realise what little end game there is. But, that’s another story!

Link to Update on the future of Sigil and Vanguard

The patch notes for today’s Lord of the Rings Online patch were more than a little amusing:

The NPC Nási (which when translated was Nazi in French) is now named Morór.

Amazing the amount of QA that went into that then

Link to Codemasters : The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ : Patch notes