Elonian Nomad - 3rd Strike

I just read over at ICv2 that Gleemax, WotC’s ambitious social-networking/hobby gaming site, will be shut down sometime in September.  The announcement was made by Randy Buehler, WotC’s VP of Digital Games.

Wizards of the Coast has made the decision to pull down its Gleemax social networking site in order to focus on other aspects of our digital initiatives, especially Magic Online and Dungeons & Dragons Insider. We continue to believe that fostering online community is an important part of taking care of our customers, but until we have our games up and running at a quality level we can be proud of, it will be the games themselves that receive the lion’s share of our attention and resources.

Our plan is to shut down Gleemax completely sometime in September. (I can’t give a more exact date because the timing depends on what’s going on with other projects.) To those of you who have posted to Gleemax, I thank you for your contributions over the past year. It is community members like you that made this project worth trying, and it is your efforts and words that gave it heart. You should save your blogs by copying that text somewhere else. Meanwhile, I encourage you to head over to the Wizards forums. The Wizards online community continues to thrive, and there should be lots of fun stuff to talk about over the coming months, including our digital offerings.

ChattyDM has some commentary on the matter.

In related news, WotC is also “discontinuing their novel lines that do not relate directly to D&D or Magic“.

Wizards of the Coast today announced the decision to refocus publishing efforts on the company’s two core brands — Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. As part of this strategy, the Discoveries imprint will be discontinued after the end of the 2008 catalog year.

“There is still so much more to discover in the rich fantasy worlds of Magic and D&D,” said Casey Reeter, VP of Marketing for Wizards of the Coast. “Refocusing our publishing resources allows us to tell those untold stories and expand the reach of our core brands.”

Beginning in 2009, any novel or series that does not support these core brands will be removed from the publishing schedule. The 2008 publishing schedule will remain unchanged.

Even though I thought that the Gleemax project was a bit too big, I was really hoping it would succeed.  Given D&D Insider (the success of which based on its current plans are still iffy to me), as well as the number of issues that still need to be fixed in MtGO, WotC does need to focus in its digital endeavors.  Unfortunately, as the months went by, I didn’t see Gleemax moving along as quickly as it should have based on that it wanted to accomplish. So, the fact that the master plan of an online hobby gaming hub is being put on hold for now wasn’t that big a surprise.

With all the brands it carries, WotC itself huge.  MtG and D&D are probably their current revenue makers, so I can see why they would want to focus on those.  I just hope their boardgame section (Avalon Hill) won’t suffer because of this focus.

Related links:

• Gleemax Farewell - official announcement
• Wizards to Refocus Publishing Efforts - official announcement
• WotC Pulls the Plug on Gleemax (ICv2)
• Gleemax is dead? (Critical Hits) - points to chatty
• Gleemax is Dead (ENWorld)

I guess WotC has more changes in mind this year aside from upgrading D&D.

WotC announced quite a lot of changes to Magic: The Gathering starting with the upcoming “Shards of Alara” block. MtG’s head designer Mark Rosewater talks about these changes.

A quick list of the changes:

• Sets will have fewer cards
• A new “mythic rare” rarity type will be introduced
• Booster packs will contain a basic land
• Theme Decks will be converted to “Intro Packs” (US$12.29, 41 cards + 1 booster)

Personally, the “mythic rare” feels like an an additional udder for the cash cow. With a non-standard composition of 56 cards (41 cards plus a booster) the “Intro Pack” feels a bit like an udder too. It does give you 3 rares instead of 2 (unfortunately you get 3 less uncommons).

Read the official announcement.
Here’s Mark Rosewater’s take on it.
Other news about it here, here, and here.

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Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) criticizes J.K. Rowling for suing a small publisher who made “The Harry Potter Lexicon”.  If you’re not familiar with the various legal disputes over Harry Potter, I suggest you read up on them.

It would’ve been really nice if the fan site link Card provided in his article worked, but since it didn’t when I tried it, check out the link above to give you a taste of what he was trying to say in that part of his piece.  I also recommend reading the comments in Slashdot to help provide a broader picture on the issue aside from the points from Card.

I agree with Card in many aspects of his piece.  I mean, Timothy Hunter anyone?  This issue, however, is not simply on Harry Potter’s “questionable originality”, it also tackles on fair-use and what would constitute as derivative work.  I do believe that the copyright holder should have the say-so over derivative work.  It is arguable, however, if a lexicon, which is research/commentary on a subject, is actually derivative work.  Perhaps excepts from the source material are, and I don’t really know if the Lexicon had any excepts.

Funny thing is, Rowling herself appears to have supported the effort when it was in it’s free-website/blog form.  It would appear that publishing contents of the site in print form for profit gave her a change of heart.

To be honest I loved the Harry Potter series.  I didn’t feel it was overly original or well written, but it struck the right chords personally, and I loved it.  Which is why I’m very very disappointed that Rowling is getting herself into things like these.

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I read this very long story/article about Lu Yang and her gaming experience with Giant Interactive’s ZT Online.  I’d rather quote article’s overview for a summary since it pretty much nails the whole piece.

“The main Southern Weekly article on ZT Online follows a gamer as she first becomes interested in the game, through her rise to power, and her eventual disillusionment with the money-sink it had become.”

The original article has apparently been removed from Southern Weekly and among the other reposts.  This article is an English translation.  Given this, it’s pretty tough to reference the original.

Regardless of it’s origin, I wanted to share this piece because I feel that it describes very well the high an MMO player gets from playing a game, and how similar this high is to gambling high or other forms of addiction.

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Do they still teach atoms as elementary particles of matter at school?

It appears that experiments have already produced enough evidence for humans to accept that matter is made up of quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom), and leptons (electron neutrino, electron, muon neutrino, muon, tau neutrino, and tau), the collective term for the two being fermions. Bosons (gluon, W and Z bosons, photon, Higgs boson, and graviton) are elementary particles too, but they are more related to force than matter. There are holes in the theories, but these particles are already experimentally proven to exist.

I hope that the local schools are at least recognizing these findings (do they already?). If they don’t, I can understand that the schools might want things ironed out first before teaching something. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to stick to old theories when the definitions are no longer applicable (how can you define atoms as “elementary particles” if they are no longer “elementary”)?

Regardless, it makes me feel old. By instinct, atoms still pop to mind when discussing the building blocks of matter, “a ba ka da…” still comes to mind when I think of the Filipino alphabet (I remember the transition to “abcd… n ñ ng…z”), and I still instinctively think that there are 9 planets on our solar system (Pluto is now classified as a “dwarf-planet”, not a “planet” by the International Astronomical Union. Ergo, we have only 8 “planets” in our solar system). It’s one thing to be technologically left behind, but it makes one feel archaic when the foundations of your world have changed.

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My pals and I went to the “Kongreso ng Komiks” last February 27, 2007 in Intramuros to see what’s going on. We had no idea what to expect, but we were hoping to see some some sort of exhibit on what works the local people do, as well as learn some information about what’s going on and where do we go from now. Unfortunately, our experience was dismal.

We arrived when a talk just started regarding the current state of the local comics industry. The presenter did show some local material we were not familiar with, but otherwise the presentation itself seemed a bit too general. It felt as though the whole presentation just said that the local comics industry is mimicking the problems of other fields like the medical field, you could almost substitute the comics mentioned with products/ services from another field and come up with the same content.

Given the topic, we were hoping that something more substantial regarding coming up with solutions would be discussed, but I guess it was not the within the scope of this presentation. An open-forum was to come afterwards, and while the host was stalling for time with very lengthly ad libs, we decided to go out and look at the exhibit.

The exhibit was nothing spectacular, although the old artwork was intriguing to see. While looking around the exhibit, however, we were told by the security guard that our car was towed! The “parking attendant” told us that if we parked in the shoulder without touching the gutter then we’d be fine. We even moved the car more to make sure we didn’t touch the gutter. This exercise was apparently futile as the car was towed anyway. We are thankful for the building administration for assisting us in retrieving the car. However, let this be a warning to any who would park in Intramuros, please make sure you are parking in something that is absolutely obviously parking space! Be wary of taking the “parking attendant’s word for it!

Since the car was towed, all our time was spend waiting for news regarding the car. We were not able to attend the open forum, which appeared to have finished shortly afterwards. If there was anything substantial discussed, we didn’t hear it. It seemed a bit doubtful that we’d have heard anything we were expecting to given that there appeared to be nobody around that was working on the new material in circulation. You’d think that of all the people that could make a difference, it would be those who ar still in the game. From what we’d seen, the people there were mostly people who had left the game.

Another thing that annoyed us was why was this “Supreme Master Ching Hai” so prominently displayed in the signage? The image could’ve been used to depict or iconify “komiks”, making it more obvious what the whole shebang was about! Was this person running in the coming May elections?!

After some research, I found out that she is a spiritual teacher of the Quan Yin Method of meditation. She apparently claims that she is the incarnation of God, the Buddha, and the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, and she goes around lecturing and promoting her method of meditation.

What this has to do with comics at all might take a bit of imagination to comprehend, but it is made easier when you consider that she is a philanthropist (among other things). Perhaps the enlightenment this Vietnamese has achieved has made her decide that supporting the Philippine comics industry was a proper thing to do.

We came to the conference hoping to see a glimmer of a more positive future for the Philippine comics industry. Confusing objectives, lack of support, and questionable sponsors, however, made the whole thing very depressing (even when you set aside the fact that your car was towed). I hope that the next time the Philippine “komiks” industry decides to have a conference, it would be nowhere near something like this.

www.darthvid.com

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I was surprised to see a move like this has been made. I can understand the financial reasons for establishments to do this, but as a gamer who actually plays the games, this is very disturbing. “Piloting” is already quite disturbing as it is, but bots too?

I haven’t thought this through in depth yet, but my current opinion is that bots and piloting causes problems and is a symptom of problems. People who actually play the game are either at an unfair disadvantage or have to put up with a diminished experience. The heart of video games is still fun-factor, and I don’t see much fun in effortless accomplishment.

I also think that this is a symptom of bad game design. If people resort to these types of activities, it may indicate that the game is only fun at the “higher levels”, and that the road to get there is not fun at all. Perhaps there’s something that can be done in the game design to make playing at all levels likable.

Of course, you can’t please everybody, and there will always be a few jerks in the crowd. This could also be side effect of the growth of online games as a whole. More people, more of everything, including the problems in online play.

Regardless, I think games are meant to be played, not just “bought”. There will always be bots or pilots, but better design and gamers demands should have the muscle to lessen the problems. Like most capitalistic endeavors, the market just adjusts to demand. Your purchases will eventually become the votes and messages that the industry will listen to, so put your money where you want things to go.

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