MMOJO.net

In most MMO communities lives a small sect of individuals that take upon themselves a hard, hated, and yet fulfilling play style known as Player Killers. Players Killers (PKs) have plagued just about every type of massively online roleplaying game since the days of D&D and BBSes. The general mentality of these people is one simple task, to spread chaos in a game. That form of chaos can manifest in a variety of forms: portal camping, ganking (dirty fighting on uneven terms), griefing, corpse camping, to scamming, kill stealing, and pirating. The posts following will be aspects or points of view from my experiences and will push the morality & ethics of MMO gaming. Flaming is expected, after all…I am a PKer.

My gaming resume includes almost every MMO since UO, but does not include UO. After being nurtured by older PKers and hearing the stories, wars, and bastardy deeds of the UO days, I was sad I did not adventure in it. I certainly missed out on some history in that era. Bouncing from MMO to MMO, I have found a certain fondness in playing that evil role in these types of communities. With nearly 17 years of experience in these types of games, I find myself asking more and more people; What good are your heroes of the world without villains to fight?

My very first PK experience was on a BBS. Popular back in the pre-internet days, I found myself sitting in a chat room on a server called Crystal Quill in the Washington DC area. Staying up late and bullshitting half the night with random people I did not know, I was first a victim of the player killer before I became one. Among the chat program was a game. Simple in nature, but fast paced with wicked consequences. The game was called BRAWL.

It was a bar room fight style game. A “brawl” would break out for anyone in the chat room that had [brawl on] flagged on their account. At random times, 15 mins min between brawls, a brawl would break out and it was every person for themselves. You could target and attack players with hand to hand or get a list of weapons to choose from. Weapons available were things like; whips, colt 45, stick of dynamite, chair, broken bottles and 357 mag. Of course if you wanted a gun, you had to search the bar for the bullets while avoiding getting hit. Typical last man standing unless you got caught by the sheriff in which you were transported to jail. Player that died were “pushing up daisies” until the brawl ended. Once the sheriff was coming, you could try and avoid the pokey if you dropped your weapons and stopped attacking. Being this a chat room, if you were killed or put in jail, your ability to chat in the room was revoked…and now you see the PK.

Not aware at first there was a game being played, because the brawl text is not viewable for people who are not flagged, I started to ask questions about what was going on. After some convincing, they got me type “brawl on” and the war started. Before I could understand what was happening, my corpse was pushing up daisies and I was unable to speak again for 15 minutes. Seething, I logged off. I had just been griefed off the server.

Licking my wounds, I felt that I should try this again. So upon logging in the next time, I quickly found the help files and read up on how the game is played. After that, I was taking down people before they finally put me in the ground. It was thrilling, exciting, and something to play while sitting in a chat room. I found my niche, I learned from the best and soon was on the other side of the table trying to convince new players to type out “brawl on” and then proceeded to gank them. This thirst for blood and full well knowing what it did for chatters is what started my PK career.

In my coming posts, I hope to offer a perspective on where a PKer is coming from. The mind set, the rush and the tactics used. Past and present experiences will be used to portray a general feel of a player killer. With Warhammer coming up around the corner, I hope to indulge a little more in my taste for chaos. Being hated is a badge of honor for this PKer. I kill you to ruin your gaming experience, hate me, and take away your time in XP’ing or accomplishing goals. That is my bread and butter and my way of having fun in MMOs.

As some of you might know, quite a few of us here at MMOJO.net have a love/hate relationship with Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Having watched it slowly but surely climb back from the brink of death after its disastrous launch, I looked forward to the upcoming Game Update 6 or GU6 set to launch in early September. Along with a long overdue free downloadable trial, this update will also include “new” player character models reworked to have 95% of the character customizations while having a much lower performance impact.

Sounds good in theory, but when the “new” models hit the test server 2 weeks ago, testers were appalled to find their favorite game appeared to be de-evolving into Vanguard: Saga of Mongoloids. The first batch of test models on the test server were horrible. So horrible that one could very clearly look at screen shots of the original, higher performance impact models, the “temporary” models currently on the live servers and the purposed “new” models on test and see evolution in reverse. From left to right, the older model on the far left to the new one on test at the far right.

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As Warhammer Online gets close to its release it is becoming clear that WAR represents the most serious contender to enter the genre since the paradigm shift brought on by World of Warcraft.  The question looms in the air over everything; Just how successful can Warhammer Online be?  This question has led straight to where you’d expect it to lead, a giant fan boy debate off on how one game will inevitably slay the other.  If you believed the internet these last few weeks apparently only one MMO can exist at a time.  So lets inject a little sense…

One has to start any debate on World of Warcraft’s success with a clarification of that success. If you start out on the premise that WoW is a game with 10 million subscribers all paying 14.99 a month you are working with bad information right from the start. There are 10 million people playing WoW but Blizzard makes very little from about 80% of those people; they are in Asia where alternative business models prevail and revenue generation is not on par with North American, European and Oceanic markets. We pay 15 dollars a month while in China they pay about 5 cents an hour. This on top of the fact that Blizzard doesn’t actually manage WoW in China so there is money coming off the top there as well.

That is the money aspect: from the pure number of players playing aspect (which for most outside observers is the yard stick for success) World of Warcraft has penetrated markets that previously most North American publishers have not been able to break into and that has resulted in millions of Asian subscribers. If SOE was to launch Everquest, Everquest 2 and its other properties in Asia (specifically China) it likely could pull in a few million subscribers just by the nature of the size of market. Koreans have been playing these games on a mass market scale since before most of us had joined the genre (the success of NC Soft is proof of this). There is a reason why SOE has opened a studio in India and Taiwan – The sheer size of the markets of China, India and the rest of Asia are bursting with a newly formed middle class that can’t wait to consume entertainment products.

So what is the real measure of competing with World of Warcraft in terms of subscribers? Around 2 million North American, Euro and Oceanic subscribers. So is 2 million attainable for Warhammer? Probably not.

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If you previously read MMOJO, you’re aware its been some time since we’ve had an update here. The news thing grew stale for all of us; you’ve got sites like MMORPG.com and Massively doing an outstanding job of apprising people over the current state of affairs in the MMO sector, we were just playing second fiddle.

And that was never really what I wanted to do with MMOJO; it was just something that felt expected I suppose. What I always wanted from this site was meaningful discussion between MMO enthusiasts, whether it be discussing a specific game in great detail, pining over The Next Great Thing, or wondering where this industry is going… it just always seemed like an important goal; one I plan on finally taking up.

So this is the new MMOJO, with a very specific mindset: meaningful dialog between MMO fans. I plan on bringing on a few other posters to help fill out the ranks; I’d ideally like to cover a wide span of MMO players, from carebears to crafters, to hardcore PVPers and more. Expect to see introductions from the other members soon.

As for me, I’ve been playing MMOs since the age of twelve, starting with Meridian 59 and Ultima Online not long after. UO is a game that played a very prevalent role in my MMO fixation; I hold true to the belief that it was an MMO far ahead of its time, and the mistakes made later with it have only held back the industry. Other notable games in my past include Asheron’s Call, Final Fantasy XI, and Dark Age of Camelot. Read more »

This is a post from the old site that somehow made the migration; kept here for posterity.

I started playing MMOs over ten years ago, starting with Meridian59. I didn’t end up having much fun with it, but it allowed me to see the possibilities of these online worlds. I was quite surprised when only a couple of years later Ultima Online was released and seemed to “do everything right” in the sense of creating a living, breathing world. I have fond memories of epic PK battles, starting my first Blacksmith store, joining my first Guild, saving up to buy a tower, and more.

As you can tell, Ultima Online was an important game to me. It left me with a lot of fond memories, and I never regretted any of the time I spent playing it. I went on to try many other MMOs: Everquest, Asheron’s Call 1 and 2, Final Fantasy XI, Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest 2, and many others. Some I only played for a couple of months, others for over a year. I was having fun, but at the same time I wasn’t feeling the same way I did with UO. I was generally growing bitter over the different games and would quit. Months later I might go back, only to experience the same feelings again. I could never seem to truly be “happy” with any of these games. I’d begun passing judgement based off my previous MMO experiences; feeling as though developers were just copying each other and were afraid to try anything new. It seemed as though all these games were becoming were repetitive grind-fests with a time consuming, yet boring endgame. I was definitely becoming a bit jaded to say the least.

Anyhow, a few months ago I was accepted into the Lord of the Rings Online beta. I tried the game for a couple of days but found myself making constant comparisons to other MMOs I had previously played and felt bitter over. I put it aside and continued to lament over the state of the genre. Then about two weeks ago LOTRO went into Open Beta. It allowed for everyone to try the final product and decide if they wanted to spend the money to pick it up once released. While I still had a less than favorable opinion of the game, I thought this was a pretty smart idea. Myfasha and Draconic were both raving over the game around this time too, so I decided to give it one last shot. I spent a couple of hours playing but it still wasn’t clicking for me; once again I was making those comparisons and pre-judging the overall game. I had given myself a negative opinion of it, yet the feelings weren’t even based ON the actual game.
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