It’s a greeting you can virtually die for. Literally.

Cory over at boing-boing has a post about Chinese Gold Farmers pointing towards this curious site of a documentary on the subject www.chinesegoldfarmers.com

step forwards – and here you get this small trilogy of video excerpts from the film in the making:

Preview Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho5Yxe6UVv4

Preview Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRrhpoMd88Y

Preview Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH1LGdjZUKQ

It’s somehow sad. Two worlds, reaching towards each other with no chance to meet except on the nether fields of cyberspace.

—

*Fight Money – is the machine translation of the Chinese term thanks to Google Translate

There. I’ve said it. Now a little more elaborate:

I logged in on Friday and rolled a human hunter. I have a slight sentiment towards female rangers dating back to the days of Diablo I, when i died many violent deaths as one. :)

The character customization generally covers the standards – hairstyles, a few faces, hair color and eye color. The graphics seem quite nice, but there’s something that I just can’t put my finger on, that leaves the feeling of poor design both for characters and environment.

The landscape – as seen in the screenshots before – is very lavish, very colorful. The sky is exceptional – with moving clouds, good colors, blurred contours, etc. But there are much clipping bugs that make polygons disappear when you look from a certain angle and the movement is a little weird.

A few bad things that popped from the very start: first, you are spawned in an instance that is something between a tutorial and cinematic, but neither really. After you complete your first objectives you are transfered in the newbie zone, which i guess is also an instance, but random people are gathered in it (much like a Guild Wars district). Here you’re given your first quests, and – lo and behold! – they’re of the “fedex” and “kill X rats” persuasion. Only slightly easier and sadly – more pointless. It was a bit surreal – I walked through a beautiful mead covered with hip-high flowers just to be surrounded with the sound of fellow newbies killing innocent npc wolves for an errand. After which – they send you to kill spiders. And then brigands. Enter-tain-ing! Yeah, right…

My second gripe here is with the instance nature of that starter area. After i got around in the humans starter grounds an hour or two, my boyfriend got home and we decided to roll same-race characters, so we can group from the very start. We made elves this time, and went through the intro-instance (you see Rivendell attacked by goblins and in the end Elrond kills a mountain troll or something) after which you get transfered to the elven start area, somewhere snowy (?!), where you kill lynxes instead of wolves, and odd little creatures Tolkien has never dreamed of instead of spiders. Fun-ney! :)

The problem? When we tried to find each other and group – we couldn’t. We stayed on the same spot on the map and still – couldn’t see each other. My guess – the starter area is an instance, but unlike Guild Wars’s Pre-Searing Ascalon you can’t change districts to find your friends, because of course districts are not implemented as a concept – the game just throws you mindlessly in some instance and looks the other way pretending to be high and mighty “persistent world”.

We didn’t play much after that. Couldn’t see any point. Basically, the game is a total WoW clone, done bad. I’ve just logged in for a while today (Sunday), to make a few screenshots and see if there’s going to be a closing event, but the chat interface is really an eye-sore, so i didn’t put much effort in the latter.

Actually, I did have some fun after all. And of course that was when i discovered the horsieeees! ^_^
First time a saw a player on horseback I was a bit surprised, because I knew form the interviews with the devs that player housing and mounts won’t make it to the release date, but may come with the first expansion (supposedly “Rohan”).
It turned out that horses in LotRO are just means of public transportation – exactly like griffins and wyverns in WoW, the only difference being that you see even the “locked” destinations listed in the options, before you’ve been to them to unlock them. But you can’t use them still, so big deal!

Anyway, I made a few rounds with my horsey :) You can’t change directions, but you can jump (slightly crappy animated), and your avatar prances on the saddle rather realistically. So overall – that was fun.

My main complaint is with the interface. The game itself is absolutely identical with WoW in terms of gameplay. You have a few “innovative” mechanics like the traits system where you get titles and attribute-modifiers by completing achievements (like you kill some number of spiders and you get the title “spider slayer”, or you find some topics on the map and you get like +1 Lore or something relevant.) but overall the game is the same. You go about killing stuff and delivering messages. You get into instanced encounters (the more challenging ones) or normal, “persistent” dungeons – the easier ones. Even the crafting system is similar.

So, what makes the difference in the end is the “polish” part, in which, we all know, there’s no one like Blizzard, although it’s mindboggling why. Why can’t all games have decent animations, normal poses for the models, readable interface that scales smartly with the resolution that you’ve chosen, less irritating small bugs and all that stuff? Is it really that hard? It’s like the MMOs are bad websites from 1994 or something – when everyone’s doing everything wrong, and no good practices are established yet. Of course, maybe I’m just spoiled by the good examples of GW and WoW. And EVE actually. Lineage maybe?

So, at least there are some, but for all the others – it’s just totally disappointing and discouraging to deal with those little irritations that prevent you from moving on to the substance, which may be good in fact, but you’ll never know, cause you can’t see the forest from all those damn crooked trees that poke you in the eyes.

And that questionable moral concludes our broadcast day ;)

Here’s a quote from the Official Linden Blog:

Stepping up the development of the Second Life Grid to everyone interested, I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL version 2.

A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid — a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups. Expect many changes and updates in the coming months in support of this architecture.

This is actually genius! Not only because they’re going OSS, and that’s fundamentally A Good Thing ™, but it may be the smart thing to do “politically” speaking. Many who have followed the phenomenon this year are expecting the hype about it to peak very soon if not already. The more gruesome forecasts are for a media backlash fueled by many of Second Life’s shortages – technical and conceptual/social.

One of them is the challenge of managing the influx of users who have been lured to Second Life by its inflated popularity. Even though the actual numbers of these have received some critical comments and reevaluations, the interest towards the game/world is definitely significant and it’s put to a test of coping with the newcomers and managing its own growth.

So in this context, it is really clever to share the load for development, bug tracking and security with the friendly force of the internet crowds, always happy to have something to poke and probe at. More so – by going open source Linden Labs is even further creating a community around its product, to shield it from the anticipated winter of media malcontent.

Either by clever thinking or intuition, in my opinion, Linden Labs are doing the right thing. And by that Second Life is inching even closer to become the Future of Internet, some have already proclaimed it to be.

I am a hero – The Chosen, not even a Frozen
Soil can keep me down
I be that Ytcracker, the platinum stacker
Rockin 15K through every town
Catch me in the Forge sellin max gold weapons
If you try to jack me see what happens
Guild [DGs] you can check my tag
Fat pocket ’cause a holdin rune’s on my bag

It all started in a place called Ascalon
Where a race called the Charr invaded us
A brave prince said “hold the wall or we’re dead”
Couldn’t hold it long- to the south we fled
To Fort Ranik, all the people in panic
The Kingdom was fallin like the Titanic
I asked the guy with the catapult “Whatcha need?
I found some parts in the wreckage are you lookin for these?”

Through the ruins to the Academy
To a place where the prince would rather be, you see
His daddy, got a few problems
Problem is that he can’t solve ‘em
So he says “You’re no longer my son.
To the Shiverpeaks bitch, get your ass on the run.”
To Kryta, to Carlotta the spider
The Arch to the Henge using Stefan the Fighter

Meet the White Mantle and beat the White Mantle
Go to the desert and flee from the scandal
Reach for Elona and Rivers of Thirst
Ascend after Dunes by doing your worst
To yourself then fulfilling by Glint’s grand design
‘Cause the prophecy states at Perdition you’ll find
The Vizier is a fake, he’s really the Lich
Beat him, take the scepter, and finish this bitch.

So that chapter closes, arenas I journey
Beatin’ Koreans in every Tomb tourny
Guild versus Guild since I got my own hall
Spikers and Spirits, I’m smitin them all
Try to take favor then offer to Grenth
Farm up some ecto then spend every cent
Salvage some runes, and heal Divine Boon
Level to 20 on all of my toons

от http://guildwars.headoff.com/forum (download)

Click Here to View the QuickTime Movie

Wow! Just WOW!

The movie here: the making of Suzanne Vega’s guitar in Second Life. Recorded in Second Life’s editor interface i guess? Need to investigate that, but if yes – it’s awesome! :)source: http://www.blip.tv/file/56120 via Wired, and BBC