Archive for the ‘MMORPGs’ Category

EVE Online and… women (sorta)

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

I went longer than I meant to before writing another post. Shocker, I know. Anyway, I spotted a special installment of EVE Blog Banter that got the neurons firing, so I thought I’d participate (even though I never have before—no time like the present!). The topic? How to get more women playing EVE Online. Since I’m a woman who plays EVE, I thought surely I could come up with something to say on the matter.

What could CCP Games do to attract and maintain a higher percentage of women to the game. Will Incarna do the trick? Can anything else be done in the mean time? Can we the players do our part to share the game we love with our counterparts, with our sisters or daughters, with the Ladies in our lives? What could be added to the game to make it more attractive to them? Should anything be changed? Is the game at fault, or its player base to blame?

 

First of all, here’s what not to do: Don’t add pink. Don’t add sparkles. Don’t add unicorns and rainbows and relationship drama. For some reason lots of companies and people seem to think that this is all girls and women want in a game. That’s what one group of women and girls wants, and let’s face it, EVE isn’t trying to appeal to them. If it were, it would be Barbie in Space, not EVE. So don’t go there—the kind of women you want to attract would just be insulted.

I don’t pretend to speak for all women, obviously. But what kept me from starting up the game for a long time was the singular focus of all the advertising material I saw. From what I could tell, the game was just about ship combat, nothing else. There are women who enjoy that, absolutely, but a wider variety of gameplay options appeals to a wider variety of people. It was only when my husband pointed out the industrial, trade, and mission aspects of the game that I agreed to take a look. Find ways to advertise those more openly. Also, widely link to creative things like Future Proof, which is so gorgeous it rendered me speechless—if you want to convert a woman in your life to playing the game, show her something absorbing & inspiring like that.

I think there are a lot more women who’d game if they found ways to do it in short installments, without needing to put in hours and hours at a time. That way they could work it in around kids, making dinner, work, classes, etc. Part of this requires having a bit more structure and help in place when starting out. The advisory tutorials are an excellent start, but they aren’t enough. My advisory agents tried to send me through .4 space right after the initial tutorials—if this had been my first character, I might have gone along with that, gotten pod-killed, and decided I hated the game. The harder you make it to figure out how to survive the game, the more solid time the players have to put in right from the start, and the less likely someone with limited spare time is to stick around.

Right now the game moves fairly abruptly from safe to pod-killing—hanging around jumpgates from .5 space to .4 in order to gank folks coming through seems rather popular. On top of that, there are plenty of missions while you’re hanging out in high-sec space that send you into low-sec, forcing you to pass through these gauntlets. If you don’t really know what you’re doing, you can end up hitting these spots fairly early on and losing your shirt. Again, frustrating, and folks who value their scarce free time might bounce.

Finally, just treat us like regular gamers when you run across us in-game. Nothing squicks most women faster than having a bunch of random guys online fawning all over them or treating them like aliens. Last time someone invited me into their corp they said it would be great to “have a mother figure to keep [them] in line,” and I couldn’t cross that corp off my list of possibles fast enough.

So, my suggestions boil down to this: Advertise the greater variety of gameplay options beyond just combat so you’ll hook a wider variety of people. Transition a little more gradually from high-sec safety to low-sec danger. Include more automatic help to steer new players toward good starting areas with the facilities, agents, and resources they’ll need. (Those last two suggestions are part of making it possible for players to play for short periods of time more easily, which could easily be a topic in its own right, as the third link in the list at the end of this article shows.) And stop treating us like some sort of monolithic alien race that simultaneously attracts and horrifies you. Most of this reads more like a list of suggestions meant to widen the appeal of EVE across both genders, but there’s a reason for that—male and female gamers aren’t as different as you think.

Oh yeah, and family or couples’ rates for accounts wouldn’t be a bad idea either. ;)

 

Here are a few links to other blog posts in the banter:

Dire Crickets

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

In New England we had little black crickets that didn’t even make me—notorious bug wimp that I am—nervous. In Maryland we don’t have crickets, we have Dire Crickets, a reference that any D&D geek will understand in a heartbeat. They’re about five times the size of the things in New England, and way weirder looking. They look like those old crickets after a radioactivity “incident” out of a horror movie about mutants. Worse, they can survive being played with, hunted, and even chomped on by my cat for more than an hour. They’ll repeatedly play dead until he loses interest, then go on the move again. I had to trap one under an empty tea tin the other morning until my husband woke up (I’m enough of a wimp under normal circumstances when it comes to bugs; it’s worse when I have insomnia and bare feet).

 

Latest book review: John Levitt’s New Tricks. Coming soon: a review of Patricia Potter’s Behind the Shadows.

 

The holiday shopping has begun! We’re seeing sales jump of our long-time faves the level 70 designs, as well as of our new level 80 designs. Grab ‘em now!

Speaking of holiday shopping, don’t forget the etsy store (errantdreams.etsy.com), filled with hand-made jewelry, bookmarks, etc. in a wide variety of price ranges and styles! More going up every day, and more than 100 items already up; we’ve recently started adding the newest bookmarks we’ve been making. Here are a few example photos:


Ice Queen Jewels by *ErrantDreams on deviantART


Tribal Hunt Bookmark by *ErrantDreams on deviantART


Sea Treasure Bookmark by *ErrantDreams on deviantART


Old World Style Bookmark by *ErrantDreams on deviantART


Jaipuri by *ErrantDreams on deviantART

Level 80 & Dance-off!

Friday, October 24th, 2008

We’ve pretty much finished rolling out the level 80 T-shirt designs at cafepress. This means two things: first, we expect to phase out the level 70 designs around the end of the year; we’ll keep them on sale until then, so grab ‘em while you can! Second, we think the level 80 designs are even better than the level 70 designs, and the level 70 designs have been quite popular. So be the first to get your own!

Also, cafepress has added some new items, like travel mugs and the flip mino camcorder. Yes, a pocket-sized camcorder. What will they add next?! Pssst—level 80 items make great holiday gifts for gamers! :D

 

 

In unrelated news, I almost always put brief excerpted versions of my reviews on Amazon, just for the heck of it. I thought it was kind of cool when I went from starting out in the 700,000s (back before there were millions of users posting reviews) to the 700s. Apparently today they started calculating the reviewer ranking differently. Partly to stop people from “ballot-box stuffing”, or finding ways to rate their own reviews. Partly to emphasize whether a person’s reviews are seen as helpful or not, so that quantity doesn’t trump quality. And partly to emphasize newness of reviews, so new reviewers get a chance to climb up the ladder.

And suddenly my rank went, literally overnight, from 679 to 64. That’s pretty cool.

Whatever Happened to Lady Jaye?

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

I was pretty young when I watched the G.I. Joe animated series as a child, but it was one of my favorite shows. So I couldn’t help taking notice—and poking around with a bit of trepidation and excitement—when I heard a G.I. Joe movie was coming. The photos look cool, and hey, it’s got Christopher Eccleston and Arnold Vosloo in it! I eagerly scanned the cast list to see who might be playing my favorite character.

But… wait… no sign of her.

I get why they’ve included Scarlett and Cover Girl as the requisite good-guy females. Really I do. They’re sexy. They’re comparatively girly. Lady Jaye didn’t wear any kind of cat-suit, didn’t have long hair. She isn’t the one the guys are going to drool over, and let’s face it, the movie folks are assuming (for the most part, rightly so) that their audience is made up of guys who want to see explosions, bad-ass combat scenes, and sexy chicks. So if you can only include a limited number of female characters, then you include the sexy ones.

But dammit, she was the character I wanted to be when I watched that show. She was a bad-ass chick who could save her own butt, and that was awesome (particularly back then). One of the things I immediately looked forward to when thinking about the new movie was seeing her re-made… but well, maybe I should count my blessings. After all, I’d rather have her not included at all than re-made as some sort of sex-pot, which is one of the other possibilities.

Still. Sigh… I’ll absolutely go see the movie anyway, but I can’t help being very disappointed.

 

In T-shirt-designing news, we have a new design. This one is both an MMO design, and a grammar geek design:

 

It’s one of those designs that’s really simple, but really versatile. The original concept had to do with the ‘meaning’ of the blue question mark in various MMOs: the repeatable quest. After all, there are so many delightful implications stemming from the idea of having a repeatable quest for the folks around you, particularly when you consider that most repeatable quests have to do with grinding faction. ;)

Then there’s the straightforward grammar geek interpretation of the question mark as punctuation.

And finally, there’s the simple aim of confusing everyone who looks at your shirt and says, ‘huh?’

I guess you could say it has something for everyone. :)

 

And finally, today’s review just in time to still call it ‘today’s’: Linda Greenlaw’s Fisherman’s Bend.

it’s a quest thing

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Yay! I finally ordered an 8G memory card for my digital camera, so I won’t be limited to 17 (yes, 17) pictures using the camera’s original 32M card. Thankfully, memory cards are surprisingly non-expensive through Amazon these days. The trick is finding out which ones will supposedly work with your camera, of course. My camera says it’ll take all SD, SDHC, and MultiMedia cards. The web site says to check with the card manufacturer to make sure. The card listings on Amazon all say to check with the camera manufacturer to make sure. Finally I found a frobbie on Sandisk’s site (since it seemed that Sandisk had a good rep) that would let me input my device’s info and then tell me which cards would work in it. $30 including shipping for an 8G card!

 

I doubt I’ll be able to finish my current book in time for a review today, but we have a new design up at the cafepress shop called it’s a quest thing:

   

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Re-Imagining, Part I

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Many things have changed since we first started selling shirts & stuff through cafepress at Gamers’ Heaven and Caffeinated Chicanery. I have a better sense of what will translate well from my screen to a T-shirt, mug, or poster. Cafepress now allows us to use the same transparent-background image on dark and light items since they have better printing processes. I have a copy of Photoshop. I have some actual—*gasp*—experience!

Now that all of these things have happened, I noted that our earliest designs were kind of… embarrassing, frankly, next to the recent ones. So, bit by bit, I’m going back through and re-working them. I’m also cleaning house on the designs that never did well. Here I will present you with some of the new/old designs that I’ve done so far; I’m starting off with the gaming shop. First, “I’m not lazy I’m just out of mana,” also known as our first runaway bestseller, which won second place in a Cafepress holiday contest based on sales:

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Gamers Driving

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

There we were, driving back from the grocery store. We arrived at the traffic light and saw something unusual, something unexpected: a dark blue race car. The driver wore a helmet; it sat low to the ground; and it had that cage-type design.

My husband’s first words: “Huh. A rare spawn.”

 

Yesterday’s book review: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guerilla Marketing. The next one will be of Donna MacMeans’s The Trouble with Moonlight.

Swirling Thoughts

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

I had about five or six things I was thinking of writing about today, but I’m drawing a near-blank. You’d think I hadn’t had my cup of coffee this morning yet. Okay, one at a time, let’s see how many I can remember:

Book reviews: Today’s review is of John Izzo’s The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die. I know it sounds gimmicky, but it’s actually a very good book.

I have three cookbook reviews upcoming soon: a Betty Crocker whole grains cookbook from Wiley; an EatingWell Healthy in a Hurry cookbook; and a New England cookery cookbook. I’ve also gotten four new cookbooks for review; two are filled with decadent desserts; one involves coffee drinks & desserts; and one focuses on olives and olive oil. I’m nearly done reading Margaret Wittenberg’s New Good Food as well.

Sayonara, Rite Aid: Imagine for a moment that you’re getting a prescription filled. It’s a medication that you have to take three pills of every day. Your doctor deliberately gives you a scrip for the time-release version so you only have to take it once a day, all three pills at once, so, for example, you won’t forget to take it at lunch. It’s a psychoactive mood stabilizer prescribed for bipolar, so it’s something you can’t mess around with in terms of blood level. You get the prescription filled. Thankfully you’ve been taking the medication for a couple of years already, so when you open the bottle up a couple of days later you know damn well your pills shouldn’t be bright pink.

Turns out they gave you the non-time-release version—without changing your instructions to take it once a day.

Imagine what could have happened if you had never taken the drug before and didn’t know any better, if you’d actually taken all three pills at once. Spike in blood level, possible toxicity effects… at best, without a consistent blood level it certainly wouldn’t have kept your moods stable.

Yes, human error exists at pharmacies. They can miss the very large ‘XR’ that indicates extended release (a later check of the carbon copy proved it had been on there). But any halfway-awake pharmacist should have realized that the direction to take three pills in the morning, combined with that drug, could be bad.

I was willing to deal with the apathetic pharmacists and ridiculously long wait times at our local Rite Aid because it was so close to home. I’m not willing to deal with careless mistakes that could truly screw me up. I’m now a happy customer of a different pharmacy, which is an extra 15 minute drive away, but had noticeably awake pharmacists and techs, a much shorter wait, and much nicer facilities.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: I love the game’s economy system more than that in any other game I’ve ever played. However, in order to really go nuts with it, you pretty much need a society (guild-equivalent) to work together. Each player is allotted ten plots of land (essentially) per server that they can put into use. On each plot of land you can build some sort of structure, like a plantation (which allows you to combine stored hours of labor plus money to harvest, for example, beans, maize, wheat, or hemp), a grain mill, a textile mill, a weaponsmith, a tanner, a hunting lodge, etc. The devs deliberately made these things fine-grained enough that you need more than ten buildings to really make anything useful.

One of my complaints in games like Warcraft is that ultimately, crafting isn’t entirely useful. There’s an end-state characters reach where there just isn’t much more you can craft that’s useful. Pirates put that to shame—there’s so much to build that’s constantly useful. Ships, ship modifications, ammo, consumable repair kits, buffs, etc. (special gunpowder, hull patches, and so on). With a good society you could really go to town playing with the economy and the pvp mechanics.

Unfortunately, everyone I know has already invested years into their Warcraft characters. Putting all that stuff together in Pirates would take a lot of time that they just don’t have. Nearly all the gamers I play with are adults, with jobs, spouses, kids. They don’t have time to do that and Warcraft, and since we already have our WoW guild kitted out and having fun, with its level 70 characters, the odds of them pulling up roots and settling down in Pirates—no matter how good it is—are virtually nil.

So as much as I’d like to play Pirates and enjoy the game, for the moment I’m not buying it. Perhaps later, if we can convince even a couple of friends to go with us, we’ll do it. But for now, it looks like we’re sticking with Warcraft.

EVE Online: Eve, on the other hand, is easier to get a satisfying experience out of without that active a corp behind you—simply because there are no levels, and thus it’s incredibly open-ended. There’s no worry that you’ll hit the top level in two months and say, “now what?”

I got my first Myrmidon and lost it again almost immediately in my first level three mission. I know, that’s incredibly pathetic. I blame the fact that I hadn’t had my coffee yet, because it’s a convenient excuse. (Actually, had my reflexes been slightly better I wouldn’t have lost my Myrmidon—I hit warp just a fraction of a second too late.) I went back with my tail between my legs, refused to drop the mission, spent a few days replacing my Myrmidon, kitting it out better, and building up shield skills, and went back and succeeded at the mission. Phew.

 

Okay, I don’t know if that was all I meant to talk about today, but it’s certainly enough for now. I’ll leave you with a bumper sticker that beautifully reflects my political feelings:


I vote for people not parties

Pirates of the Burning Sea Pre-Order Mess

Monday, December 10th, 2007

I love the Pirates of the Burning Sea MMO. I really, really do. I’m utterly and totally addicted to both sea combat (pirating the merchant ships! yarrr!) and the economy. I plan to get into that in more depth soon. But today I want to talk about the pre-order thingie.

Here’s the deal. In order to encourage retail sales (which gets the game on shelves, which puts it in front of buyers, which results in more sales) SoE put out a pre-order box to retailers. This box includes a 60-minute CD of music, and codes for an early launch (two weeks before the normal start date if you just get the normal release box) as well as a couple of spiffy in-game items. The minor amount of money you spend on this box—$10—goes toward your purchase of the final game, so it doesn’t cost you anything. So far, so good.

Then everything goes to Hell. First, most of the companies supposed to be stocking these boxes had never heard of the game, much less the pre-order box program or what it meant. Most of that has been sorted out now, but there are still Gamestops and other outlets that have no idea what PotBS is or that don’t understand there’s any sort of pre-order program available before the major release date.

If that wasn’t bad enough, a lot of the boxes are missing the insert that has the pre-launch codes on it. Without those codes, the only thing you’re getting for that pre-order effort is the music CD. Buyers have been advised on the Flying Labs forums to shake boxes before buying (you should be able to hear the insert slide around) and to, if possible, get customer service to open up the box before you buy to ensure the insert is in there. Folks have reported going into a Best Buy somewhere only to find that fully half of the boxes are missing the inserts. If you get home and find the insert is missing, you’re supposed to go back to the store and swap your box for one that has the insert. Problem is, anyone who doesn’t read the forums isn’t going to know that.

Then there are the places you can order from online such as Amazon that list the various pre-order bennies in their descriptions, but also list the ship date as the major release date. And although it was stated at one point that Amazon would be shipping the pre-order boxes, when I asked if anyone knew for sure that this was happening and when, there was no answer.

So, while we kept our Amazon order in the pipeline just in case we couldn’t find the box, we decided to go looking for the pre-order box. I really want to get in on the whole early launch and so on. No luck at Gamestop, so we decided to try Best Buy. We went this Saturday.

The good news: they had a bunch of pre-order boxes on the shelves! Whooo!

We of course decided to do as suggested on the forums and take the boxes to customer service and have them checked for the insert. We explained to the girl there that many people had been finding that the boxes were missing some of their contents, and we wanted to check the boxes before we bought them. She looked at us like we were idiots and told us that it’s a pre-order box, it doesn’t come with software. We said yes, we know, we’re not talking about software—we mean the pre-launch keys that are supposed to come on a package insert. She rolled her eyes and said she’d check and disappeared into the back. A few minutes later she emerged and told us the box was supposed to be empty.

I’m thinking to myself… supposed to be empty? Why the hell would I come in here and buy an empty freaking box?

We calmly attempt to explain to her that no, as the box says right there on the back, buying the pre-order gets you early access to the game, and that there’s supposed to be an insert that gives you the keys for this. She gets angry and tells us just go buy the boxes and open them.

We leave at that point, shake the boxes well to make sure it sounds like they have the inserts, and buy them. Before we leave the store we double-check that they have the inserts in them, which thankfully they do. However, I have no doubt whatsoever that if they’d been missing the inserts, and we’d gone back to customer service to ask for new boxes, we would have been told the boxes were supposed to be empty and we couldn’t have new ones.

So the pre-order boxes were meant to encourage retail sales, and yes, they got me to go into a retail store and buy a game that normally I would have bought online. However, the experience of actually going in and buying that game convinced me never EVER to go to a Best Buy again if I can help it. And if you’re looking for Pirates of the Burning Sea pre-order boxes in the Annapolis area and go to the Best Buy near the Annapolis Mall, make damn sure you shake the boxes well before you buy them.

 


Skill training completed

Soups, 70 Hottie, and Games

Friday, December 7th, 2007

Today’s review is of Mollie Katzen’s Recipes: Soups. It’s good, but it didn’t bowl me over. Which is too bad, because it’s exactly the kind of food I could use right now.

Sorry for so few reviews, posts, visits to other folks’ blogs, etc. this week. It’s been a very low-energy week. I finally saw the gastroenterologist yesterday, and he basically told me this: yep, looks like my gallbladder is slowly deteriorating and on its way out. But until a test like the HIDA scan or ultrasound shows that unequivocally (the HIDA results were borderline), a surgeon won’t be willing to take it out. So in the meantime, we try a few drugs that probably won’t do much but might if I’m lucky, and mostly we wait until my gallbladder gets bad enough that tests aren’t equivocal and a surgeon will take it out.

As the doc said, “welcome to 2007.”

On the one hand, I’m glad to have surgeons be a bit conservative, and not want to just open patients up and take out our innards at the drop of a hat. Every time we go under anaesthesia and they open us up there’s some risk, even if the procedure is incredibly minor, like this one. However, when they know a certain set of symptoms and test results mean they’ll have to do it eventually, then I can’t help thinking delaying is mostly about insurance: i.e., they won’t do the procedure unless they can prove to insurance they had to. Which means that in the meantime, I have pain and nausea.

*grumble, grumble*

Well, at least it’ll force me to eat a very low-fat diet, because damn do I hate nausea with a passion.

Anyway, I am aware that most of the site (the regular pages, rather than the blogs) is inaccessible right now. Unfortunately I need to wait for Jeffrey to get home from work to do anything about it if it doesn’t recover on its own. In the meantime, I can distract you with the rather hysterical shirt design Jervis came up with:


Level 70 Hottie

Also, since most of our old WoW guild has kind of died away until nearly all that’s left in terms of active players are a bunch of us who all know each other in real life, Jervis decided it was time to just go form our own guild, so we could have a guild vault and all that fun stuff. I don’t know who suggested it, but somehow we ended up with a guild name of “Innocent Bystander.” I find it incredibly funny to have that under my character names!

Since I’ve been so low-energy this week I’ve been playing around in the Pirates of the Burning Sea open beta. I love that game, and look forward to perhaps writing something of a review of it. I adore playing around with the economy. Wealth is your friend. ;) Of course, going out and pirating merchant ships is an awful lot of fun too…

Oh, and I almost forgot. Apropos of nothing, you’ll need a whole box of tissues for this story.