There’s nothing quite so fulfilling as opening up Outlook at 4:32 on the Friday before your vacation just to turn on the Out of Office assistant:

I am out of the office beginning Monday, July 30th.  I will be returning on Monday, August 5th.   If this is an urgent issue, please contact…

Vegas, here I come. 

I’m actually not flying out till Tuesday, but I haven’t taken a real vacation since becoming a consultant, so I decided to take the entire week off.  My project’s not at a critical phase right now.  We’re not behind on our milestones.  Everything’s currently in order, and besides, if there ARE problems, the team has my number.

So, a full week off.  I have no idea exactly how to spend it.  And for a guy who makes his living helping companies plan their time…it’s a great feeling. 

See you at FanFaire!

The Boston Globe picked up a nice little article which drops a few hints on what’s going on in the minds of 38 studios:

“But a stroll through the company’s offices revealed hundreds of sketches of creatures who seem to have come from central casting in Middle Earth. The designers are planning for 12 species or “races” in the game, and while they may not be called elves or orcs or dragons, there is certainly a family resemblance.”

I don’t have much to say on the article other than the obvious “wait and see” advice.  I’m a big fan of several of the guys at 38 and I think they’ve got a solid plan, but I’m more than happy to wait out the next few years to determine if they’ve got a game I want to play.

EDIT:  And of course, Cuppy beat me to it.  Oh well, back to preparing for Vegas.

Time passes slowly up here in the mountain
We sit beside the bridges and walk beside the fountains
Catch the wild fishes that float though the stream
Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream.

-Bob Dylan

Just weeks ago I booked my flights to Las Vegas for FanFaire, and bemoaned the fact that I’ll have to spent around 3.5 hours in the air flying from Minneapolis.  Seriously - three whole hours!!

Well, a flight that long demands some new reading material, so it’s off to the bookstore with me.  I’m a bit of history buff, so I head right over to that section and start poring through the titles.   Though a lot of the books I  read might seem pretty dry to most people, I find myself completely engrossed in the titles.

One fact I find myself continually fascinated by is the amount of time spent travelling throughout history.  When Julias Ceasar took his command in the provice of Baetica in  “Farther Spain” in 61 BC, it took him 3 weeks by litter from Rome.  In 1820, it took nearly 4 months time for the whaler Essex to travel from Nantucket to the whaling grounds of the central Pacific.  Even at the turn of the 20th century, it could take weeks for a steamboat to travel less than a thousand miles up the Congo river.

Compared to all that, my meager 3 hour flight seems fairly meaningless.  And yet, players still complain today that it can take 20 whole minutes to travel from one end of an MMO’s online world to the other.  Seriously - 20 whole minutes!!

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I’ll be there.  Will you?

It’s official.  At least a dozen members of the Legion of the White Rose will be at FanFaire.  We’ll even be wearing official Legion of the White Rose gear.  Most of the really good stuff is marked as NO TRADE, but if you have the plat, you can pick up some of our lesser loot from the broker. 

It’s been a roller coaster of a week.  I’ve managed to start (yet not finish) a good half dozen articles, but between work and some familial issues, it’s been hard to sit down and finish the articles as I’d prefer.

Expect a few shorter than usual (What?!  No 5,000 word monstrosities about guild politics?) posts sporadically throughout the week. 

Could City of Heroes be coming to the PS3?  What about Lineage III? Auto Assault?

According to Sony’s announcement at E3, it’s not just possible - but even likely.  You see, at E3, Sony has announced that NC Soft has will be producing all future MMOG’s “exclusively” for the Playstation 3.

Read more here and here at Warcry.  (/shameless plug)

If this is the case, it could explain why NC Soft isn’t necessarily releasing it’s iron grip on the Auto Assault property just yet.  It  could also explain the suddeness of the announcements lately regarding the imminent shut down of service just prior to E3.

It’s definately interesting, to say the least.

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages.”

-Adam Smith

I want more rewards.

If we’re honest, we all want more rewards.  It’s human nature to want to receive rewards, not only as a gift, but as a sign of recognition.  In our daily lives, often we don’t have the opportunity to stand out to large numbers of people.  Occasionally, we might pick up an office award or find ourselves named employee of the month.  Maybe we get to keep the game ball after a season of beer-league softball.  Maybe we wake up and find that the kids have destroyed the kitchen to make us some early 20th century cubist masterpiece of a breakfast to remind us that we really aren’t such bad parents after all (or because the little monsters want something). 

For the most part, most of us go through live largely unrecognized.  For many of you reading this article right now, you earn that recognition nightly in MMO’s like Everquest 2.  And yet, even then, you’d like more rewards.

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A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

-George Moore 

 Guild Halls. Mention those two words on an EQ2 forum and be prepared for some serious discussions.  Oh, everyone has an idea of what would they’d like to see in a guild hall, but how many of those ideas have a chance at eventual release?

It’s not an unpopular idea.  The idea is mentioned frequently on forums, fansites, and blogs.  Even SOE developers have mentioned how much they’d like to see guild halls eventually implemented.  The original box from the November 2004 launch even lists “guild halls” as a feature for buyers. 

So why no guild halls?

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I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

-Oscar Wild 

I love to roleplay.  I’m just annoyed by roleplayers.

It sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not.  Part of the problem probably lies with the word itself.  Few words in MMO’s are as charged by prejudice and emotional investment as the word “roleplay”.  Virtually every MMO today releases with at least one server dedicated to “Roleplay Encouraged”.  Websites which span multiple games have cropped up to serve the needs of the “roleplayer community”.  Even within such communities, players who willingly label themselves as roleplayers argue amongst themselves regarding what does and does not qualify as “true” roleplay. 

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Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

-Sir Winston Churchill

As promised, here is the second part to my thoughts regarding guild recruiting.  In the first part of this series, I discussed the basics which need to be regarded before a single recruiting effort should be made. Now that we’ve laid the foundation, it’s time to start building the house.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of ways to recruit new members for your guild.  Most of these methods can be boiled down and reduced to just a handful of categories, however.  I’m not necessarily going to go into detail on all the different ways I advocate within my own Legion.  Not only would many of these ideas not work for many different types of guilds, but the contextual nuances would be missing, leading to possible confusion and thus frustration.  So, for the time being, we’ll stick to general lessons I’ve learned over the years. 

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