In case you missed it, SOE Designer, Steve “Saavedra” Kramer, has been working on a level 80 version of Runnyeye:

The best revamps (to me, of course!) are the ones where I get to scrap everything without worrying about what was in there before, and make an entirely new zone out of it. I was given a choice of zones to do this with a few months ago, and eventually settled on making a level 80 instance of Runnyeye.

Runnyeye itself has presented some challenges, but I think it’s coming together nicely after some much needed housecleaning. When I first went into the zone completely empty, I couldn’t help but think that the goblins really need to clean up this dump, so the first thing I did was start deleting all of the trash piles and modifying the zone art to fit my needs.

The goblins were expecting some guests after all, and it wouldn’t do to invite dignitaries into a hovel.

Read the entire entry at the official SOE Developer blog.

Confirmed updates on the specifics of this dungeon will be posted after the jump (keep checking back).

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My guild is serious about our raiding. My guild is typically considered to be fairly casual by other guilds.

To many of you, those two statements seem to be completely contradictory to each other.

To those of you who consider yourselves a bit more hardcore, it may be hard to fathom how a guild which doesn’t maintain strict attendance requirements, with an active membership of nearly 60 members (outright “bloated” by many raid guild standards), who only raids three nights a week (for only three hours at a time) and who isn’t even to third tier of T8 raiding could possibly even think to consider themselves “serious” as raiders.

Yet, to other players who may not be quite as involved as we are, the thought of a guild which tracks raid points and holds bids for loot, who raids three nights a week (for a whopping three hours at a time!), who is already in the second tier of T8 raiding, and who maintains a large active roster of nearly 60 members could only be described as “serious” raiders.

Truly, “casual” (and “hardcore”) is in the eye of the beholder.
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Well, Bruce over at MMOGChart.com recently posted version 23 of his ever-expanding MMOG subscription tracking data, which got me to thinking: just what kind of numbers are we really dealing with? We hear lots of stats on subscription counts - World of Warcraft’s 10 million subscribers being the best example - but not so much about tallies from individual genres.

Fortunately, Bruce has provided not only a chart of subscription share by genre here, but he also gives access to his raw data. With that in mind, I decided to take a look at the statistics myself….

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Here’s your “small world” story of the day.

I’m at work this morning at a very large, rather well known client.  I’m building out system designs for my team’s next release.  The new data recovery manager that’s been hired is behind me is talking on his phone loudly to a friend.  I’m trying not to eavesdrop, but he keeps mentioning words like “CyberpowerPC” that perk me up.  I was JUST looking over that site this morning to pick up a new gaming rig to replace my aging model.

Just as I’m trying to get back to concentrating on my own work, he also mentions that he’s hoping to go to Vegas “this year”.  Come to think about it, he was mentioning Vegas earlier this morning on a different phone call.  it grabbed my attention because I’d just booked my own room for FanFaire this week, and I was scouring the sites this morning looking to snipe some decent airfare.  Again, I’m thinking maybe it’s just a coincidence.

Then, he mentions to his friend on the phone that he wonders if he should come over tomorrow…”unless you’re going to be playing EQ all morning, and then I’ll just see you in-game”.

Full stop.  What did he just say??

Yeah, he’s talking about SOE FanFaire.  This guy who easily makes over six figures at my work is talking gaming openly.  Come to find out, he’s calling around to his friends this morning trying to see who’s going or not.

Yeah, it’s a small world.  I love this game.

EDIT: It looks like Tipa beat me to it this morning by an hour.

According to the USPTO’s TESS trademark database, Sony Online Entertainment has filed two trademarks for “Everquest II: The Shadows of Odyssey” (77451534 and 77450867).

Based on recent discussions in the lore forums regarding the long lost Shissar and hints in the forums from developers regarding the fact that Luclin is, in fact, not a barren wasteland, this could potentially point to a Luclin based expansion.

However, please note that the recent lore fiction regarding “Escape from Guk” and “Flight of the Mudskipper” could indicate a different locale altogether.

I was having a discussion with a friend over lunch about Earth Day and the amount of attention the environment is picking up in the last year or two by retailers. At some point, we started to discuss our “carbon footprints“. There’s a lot of talk these days about carbon footprints. In a nutshell, that’s the amount of carbon dioxide you and I and everyone else on the planet produces through our daily activities. The carbon footprint is actually a combined total determined by our primary footprint (directly caused) and our secondary footprint (indirectly caused).

Why am I bringing this up on a site dedicated to gaming?

As we our discussion naturally turned to gaming (as it almost always does), we began to try to discuss the contributions support classes make to groups and raids that is often unquantified by most players. We started to talk about parsers and running some controlled experiments on the Everquest II Test Server to verify exactly how much of a boost some debuffs really produced. As we dug into the math, I started to realize how little most players really understand the impact they have on overall damage totals.

In short, we’d started talking about our DPS Footprints.
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By Calum MacLeod at USA TODAY:

“China, already the world leader in cellphone use, has surpassed the USA as the No. 1 nation in Internet users.”

The Current tally?

China: 220 million users as of February 2008 (17% of population).
US: 216 million users as of December 2007 (71% of population).

Another fun quote from the article?

“My friends all agree — no Internet, no life,” Sun says. “We use it every day for MSN, and I love playing games like World of Warcraft.” The game is so popular that players can pay companies in China to play in their place so they can continue gaining points.”

No one likes bugs.  Developers would rather their designs work as intended, so you know they don’t like bugs.  QA is embarrassed by bugs that make it to release, so you can bet they aren’t fond of them.  Programmers and coders would much rather be spending time on new features than fixing older code, so you can bet that most of them aren’t too keen on bugs.

Oh yeah, players aren’t exactly fans of bugs, either.

Yet, players also want new content.  They want new mounts, new armor, new dungeons, new raid targets, new solo quests, new housing, new guild halls, new art, new everything really.

It’s a tough balance to strike for most studios, and no matter what decision is reached, it’s inevitable that it will not be nearly enough for hardly any players at all.

Here at Clockwork Gamer, we’re curious though.  Which is more important to you, fixing old content or working on new content?

Our Question of the Week for April 21st is this:  Would you prefer studios spend more time and resources on fixing bugs or creating new content?

Let us know what you think in our comments section below.

Graphics lag.

We’ve all experienced it at one time or another. Even the most powerful gaming system can be brought to its knees occasionally, leaving us with herky-jerky graphics that stutter or even lock up.

There can be any number of reason why this occurs, but fortunately, there’s some generic (and even game-specific) methods to cut down your chances of lag occurring.

Hit the jump for some ways you can get smoother performance in your games without having to invest in heavier hardware.

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We’ve got some word of this year’s Fan Faire!

Per the latest SOE pocast (#33), Fan Faire 2008 will be held in Las Vegas, at the Hilton, from August 14-17.

Low bandwidth

High bandwidth

The key bits begin at 25:00.

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UPDATE - The Fan Faire site is live, and confirmed!

http://events.station.sony.com/fanfaire/

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