Gaming is getting more attention these days, and it's not all negative! NYTimes has taken a look at gaming and dieing, including in SWG and EQ. I copied a couple tidbits to entice you to read the entire article.

Mr. Humble decided to make changes to EverQuest in 2001 after months of internal debate and at least one sleepless night. At 4 a.m. one wintry day, hours into a game session, his character died. "I couldn't log off because I needed to get back to my corpse before I logged off or else my corpse would decay and I would lose all my stuff," Mr. Humble said. "That's not fun. That's when I decided, you know what, we're going to modify this."

I remember those days in EQ and now experience the following in SWG.

In the world of online games, the EverQuest penalty is still pretty severe. Star Wars Galaxies, set in the science fiction universe imagined by the movies, has a much lighter penalty: characters that are killed can "spawn" at specific safe areas, with their equipment somewhat damaged but otherwise intact. "It's by no means a huge punishment," said Haden Blackman, producer of Star Wars Galaxies for LucasArts. But Galaxies exempts characters from any death penalty if they are killed by other players rather than by computer-generated monsters, to create an incentive for players to take one another on, Mr. Blackman said.

You can read the entire New York Times article here.

Neenerneener.net is sponsoring a team for the MS walk and is looking for donations from the gaming community. It's a good charity, so I thought I would link to it. I gave my donation. Please consider making yours too. His story and links for donating are at this link.

It's a milestone day for us here. 5 years ago today - March 8, 1999 - I signed up for a free web service and fancifully called the page I created Allakhazam's Magical Realm. That page consisted of a single paged, rather basic guide on how to play Everquest - choosing a class and race, creating a character, and basic fighting and grouping tactics. I did it on a whim really, as much to see what it was like to do a website as anything, since I had never done anything like that before. I posted a link to the guide on various beta forums and people there seemed to like it. I got a lot of feedback on what it was missing and suggestions on how to enhance it, so I started to tinker. I beefed up the existing information, split the guide into multiple pages and added class guides and zone descriptions and links to every decent article I could find on the game. More people came by and suggested more improvements. Then I added quest walk throughs and equipment guides. People started submitting information to me to include in the guides. Over time, the site got too busy for a free web service, so I moved it to the servers of an existing game site that had offered hosting. The site just kept on growing and expanding. I put in more and more of my free time on it and every day I added more information to the site. Then, near the end of 1999, I hooked up with Illia, who wanted to create a bestiary database for the game. We decided to create Allakhazam.com, LLC, buy our own server and move the site to our own domain, and see where we could take it from there. Over time, Illia not only created the bestiary, but databased most of the other information I had collected. Even more people began to use the site and Allakhazam started to become a well known destination for many Everquest players. When Dark Age of Camelot came out, we decided to create a new site for that game as well. It too became very popular. Even though it was now a full time job for us, it got to the point where two of us couldn't keep up with everything, so we added Darkflame, Railus and Danalog to our staff. We continued to add more games and more people and to refine and expand upon the existing information to make it even more useful and accurate. Now, 5 years to the day after throwing up that single page Everquest guide, Allakhazam's Magical Realm covers seven games, has a staff of 12 people, runs on 10 servers, has over 300,000 registered users who have posted almost a million comments, does between 2.5 and 3 million page views a day, and is one of the largest and most popular game sites on the entire internet. All I can say is wow. And we owe it all to you, who have stuck with us through various highs and lows, contributed information and feedback, used the site and recommended it to friends, and have made the site into what can only be described as a true community. Thank you all. We wanted to give something back to those who have been with us from the start. Therefore, we've gone back through our registrations and picked out the 25 oldest, still active, registered accounts. Each of those accounts has been given three months of free premium access. It's just a small showing of our appreciation for everything you have done for us. Those that are current premium members got three months tacked onto their membership, and those that aren't now have premium access. Here are the names of those we activated and the number they registered at: Banluil (12), mistrornge (21), Cisas (22), Rthila (25), natsuko (27), Raithier (46), Farmere (47), MeMooch (57), QanniCazicThule (63), Auldian (74), Ellegon (83), Balein (93), Shamusan (95), Bortas (99), Flaviusafranius (105), farkhar (110), Majik (113), Anthalas (118), Dagr (130), Bonladar (139), Payn (142), Fallon (150), ninjergranni (158), Tinx (161), Lautrec (169). Thank you to everyone who has made us so much of a success. We have not stopped growing and expanding and learning, and I look forward to serving the community as well or better over the next 5 years and beyond.

Sobe, over at the Druid's Grove had a chance to interview Tigole and Katricia from Blizzard about World of Warcraft.

If abilities are purchased with points via a skill-tree, will a character at max level have enough ability points to have all the abilities at useful (or max) levels, or just some? If only some, what sort of tradeoffs in other abilities will we see? Both the skill point system and the talent system are being iterated on. Each character will have to make choices as to which skills, tradeskills and abilities he chooses to specialize in. Players should be able to gain exposure to a wide variety of skills but no one character will be able to master all skills. Players also have the ability to forfeit skills in order to pursue other interests. --Tigole

The full interview is available on tgd forums.

I know many of you are looking forward to this game, so I figured I would mention that a form will be posted on the main site tomorrow (Wednesday) at 6:00 PST. The signup period will go through February 4th and will not be on a first come, first serve basis, so there's no rush to be the first one to sign up. Here's the link to the WoW site.

Spotted on the Battle.net forums:

At 6:00 pm PST on Wednesday, January 28th, the signup period for the World of Warcraft Beta Test will officially begin. We will provide a link to the beta-test application right here in the news section at that time. Testers are not going to be chosen on a first-come, first-served basis, so you will be able to submit an application and receive equal consideration anytime during the signup period, which will end on Wednesday, February 4th at 6:00 pm PST. Please note that multiple submissions from the same household will result in complete disqualification. For this initial phase of the World of Warcraft beta test, we will only be able to accept applications from Canada, Korea, and the US. The test for Europe and other countries around the world will happen later this year. Please do not contact us for further information regarding the beta test; we will be posting a FAQ in the days ahead.

Hope to see ya there!

The Daedalus Project (http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus) is an ongoing online survey study of MMORPG players. Two new surveys are available. There is a short multiple-choice questionnaire that should take about 5 minutes to complete. And there is also an open-ended survey on a variety of game-play issues and memorable experiences. You can find these new surveys at: http://www.nickyee.com/mmorpg Nick

I thought I would pass this along for anyone living in the San Fransico/San Jose area: Are you a current or former Ultima Online subscriber? Do you live in the San Francisco area? Do you want to tell the Origin team what they should do with the next Ultima Online project? Now’s your chance! Origin, through a contracted research firm, will be conducting focus groups on Feb. 4 and 5 in Sunnyvale, CA (near San Francisco and San Jose). There will be six groups, with 10 to 12 people in each. The groups, about 90 minutes each, will discuss what they like and don’t like about UO. They will also be asked to comment on new ideas. Participants will be paid $100, and they will have to sign a legally binding non-disclosure agreement. That means they won’t be allowed to discuss anything they see or hear during the group sessions under penalty of law. If you are interested in participating, call Nichols Research at 1-408-773-8200, ext. 2020, or email erecruiting@nicholsresearch.com. Mention “Project #C3032” when you contact them. It’s important that we get current AND former players, so if you’ve stopped playing UO, please contact us anyway. See you in Sunnyvale!

The developers think you should come back and try SWG again. The game isn't the same as it as 6 months ago, so load up your game, patch and come play with us!

Confident that the game has improved dramatically last year with the new features (like vehicles and player cities), new content (like the Warrens) and bug fixes (hundreds squashed), we've reactivated the accounts of players who ended their subscription last year. There was a snaffu and only the people who had opted-in for the SWG newsletters got their accounts reactivated. Yesterday, we fixed that so everyone who quit last year is given the 14 day trial to check the game out again. We think we've done great things since the game released and we have a very solid process for doing more (new features, exciting content and enhancements recommended by the player correspondents). You can check out the info on this page. Send it to your friends who you think might want to give it another try. Kevin "Q-3PO" O'Hara SWG Community Relations Manager

If you have some extra time this evening, check this out! Straight from the Stratics News Page:

SWG Stratics is pleased to announce this month's House of Commons chat with LucasArts and Sony Online Entertainment, the developers of Star Wars Galaxies. Be sure to join us as we discuss the next big update to Star Wars Galaxies- Player Cities. The chat will be on September 25th at 7:00 PM US/Eastern (If you are in another time zone, check out World Time Zones to find out what time that is where you are) in #swghoc on Stratics IRC. To connect to Stratics IRC, use one of the servers and your favorite IRC client:
• irc.stratics.com, port 6667 (connects to a random server on our network)
• irc.frws.com, port 6667 (USA, Colorado)
• irc.epaxsys.net, ports 6667, 6668, 7000 (USA, Colorado)
• irc.glowfish.de, ports 6667, 6668, 7000 (EU, Germany)
• stratics.afraidyet.net, port 6667 (USA, Georgia) As an alternative, you can also use our web-based Java IRC client, located here. Join us before, and after, as the community chats amongst themselves in #starwars! Hope to see you there!