Steady's Gaming Blog

APB made a nice post in their forums yesterday, addressing some of the issues the game has. See the post here. Here are the highlights.

Cheaters, catching them and removing them, I always like this one.

Vehicle Handling – A major overhaul to make the vehicles less slippery. I am not too sure about this one. I found the learning curve for driving a bit steep, but after a bit of practice, I did not have any trouble. The other day I was doing some nice slides, and moving between cars in traffic rather well. My biggest problem is the other live players; they tend to run into me quite a bit. In fact some people are just grieving, by putting up burnt car barricades, and playing demolition derby. So I hope they do not change it too much.

Combat- they are looking at every aspect. I do have a problem killing people. That has more to do with me, then it does the game. I have trouble aiming, but with that being said, I think it does need a bit of work, so that is a good thing.

Camping- going to address this issue as well, another one of those human factors, that if peoples would just play fair, and play as the game right this would not be a problem, but hey always has to be that camper.

Missions- making them a bit more complex, and deeper, a bit more strategy. I am all for that, I am an old dude, no hand eye coordination, strategy is my friend.

They also mentioned matchmaking; I will address that in another post, as I have pretty long opinion on this subject.

Again, I like this game. It is very entertaining to play. For me it is not about kill to death ratio, more about fun, which I have. I have to give the devs of APB credit; they have not crawled under a rock, and hidden from their player base. They post in the forums, and on their webpage they have a twitter feed, which does not always shed a positive light on APB. So that is pretty good, they cannot please everyone, someone is always going to have a problem, so it is nice to see them moving in a positive direction.

So my twitter feed this evening is full of information about the new mount you can buy in World of Warcraft. Yes, you too can own a Celestial Steed for the low price of $25.00. One tweet has them selling about 54,000 mounts for every percentage tick in the stock queue. Other estimates have about 120,000 people waiting in the queue to purchase the Steed.

Blizzard Executives Wife “Hi honey how was your day”

Blizzard Executive “Pretty good, we made 300 million dollars today selling a make believe mount.”

Like Blizzard, or hate them, they know how to make money. Trade chat is full of haters today. (Yeah, I am really tired of the nightly argument about Gearscore). The purist, the grinders, the elitist are mad. I heard one of them call Blizzard a Korean money hungry company. Others are complaining about spending days picking their nose for some rep, to get a mount, and now any noob can spend $25.00 for a cool mount. Some are appalled, how dare Blizzard open an online store, and actually sell things. Hello, it is about time. Look around people, show me an MMO that is not selling something to make more money, and I will show you an MMO that is long gone.

Here is my point of view. They are not making you buy the darn thing, so shut up, and go grind some more with your elitist freak friends. No one is making you purchase it, go somewhere with your gear checking elitist, snotty friends, and get a life. Go fight the Lich King or something, but really get out of trade chat. Last time I checked, Blizzard was in the business of making money. Blizzard does a pretty good job of making a pretty good game as well. So I have no problem with them making a few bucks off a silly mount. If you owned a business, and could make more money off selling a silly mount, would you not do it? They own the game, not us; they are free to do as they please. I think it is pure genius; they are selling a ton of these mounts, and making a ton of money. Social networking sites like Twitter, and Facebook, are full of chatter about World of Warcraft today. Bingo, you cannot pay for that type of advertising. Pure genius, raises the profile of World of Warcraft, and make money off of it, makes sense to me.

Personally I am not going to purchase one. It is too expensive for my taste. I am not a collector. I have a few mounts that I use, and they meet my needs. So I see no reason to spend $25.00 for another mount. Maybe it is my graphics (which are pretty good), but I do not think that the Celestial Steed looks all that good. In fact, it looks rather crude to me. I do not sit around Stormwind, and show off my mounts to others. So I really have no reason to purchase the mount.

I hope that Blizzard takes all that money, upgrades some of their hardware, and reinvests it into World of Warcraft. It will make an already good game, even better to play. You elitists out there need to figure it out. You are not making World of Warcraft better, you are making it worse. In fact you are killing the game off with your snotty attitudes. The causal gamer is making World of Warcraft popular again. You are becoming as extinct as that free mount you spend days grinding for

Just a few interesting tweets today, that I wanted to share with others..

First, the good folks at wow.com have created an impressive list of resources for World of Warcraft. You have been warned, be prepared to spend a few hours looking at websites. Lots of good World of Warcraft information here. Nice to have all this info in one place, a must have bookmark for anyone that plays World of Warcraft.

Wow.com, Guide to Wow resources

Second, City of Heroes updated the Going Rogue website today. Calvin Scott and Ghouls are introduced, are they friend or foe? Nobody knows. Just more fluff, still no hard facts. Come on Paragon, I need some facts here, enough fluff.

Going Rogue

So that is my Twitter Roll for today, everyone have a great gaming day.

I have become addicted to twitter. That is pretty surprising, considering I have resisted social networking for the longest. I have no friends on Facebook, and I like it that way. The only reason I have an account was so I could make a page for the Combat Engineers.

A few things on my twitter roll I found very interesting today, so I thought I would share.

First, they are making a Battlestar Galactica MMOG. My heart be still, yet another game for the sci-fi geeks. I hope this game gets off the ground, and does not make me suffer like Stargate Worlds has. Yes, I still check the Stargate page once a week in hope of news that the game is actually going to launch. It looks like Battlestar is going to be a free browser game, so it looks pretty good.

Battlestar Galactica MMOG

Second, Warwitch, Melissa Bianco, from City of Heroes is raising money for Susan G Komen. Looks like she is going to walk 60 miles over three days in October to raise money for finding a cure for breast cancer. I never like to past up a chance to promote a good causes. Below is a link to her donation page.

Donate to Susan G Komen

So that is it todays Twitter roll. I think from time to time, when I see something of interest on Twitter; I will start posting a few of them here.

The City of Heroes Twitter feed is sending out some costume codes missing one letter. You can go into your master account and try to guess the missing letter or number, to win.

City of Heroes Twitter

We have joined the ranks of Twitter. Will update the happenings of the Combat Engineers Gaming Community. Just an evil plot on my part to never have to PUG again. You can follow us at.

Combat Engineers Gaming Community Twitter