Is the force fading?

So for my news article I went to a site that I frequent for gaming news and that is Kotaku.com. They have news stories and blog posts about games and visitors can comment on the stories of the day. The article I found for my game, Star Wars The Old Republic, focuses on the drop off of subscribers. Electronic Arts, the publisher of the Star Wars MMO, had roughly 1.7 million subscribers in its quarter 3 financial earnings statement. As of quarter 4, that number has dropped 25% to  1.3 Million subscribers. It goes to say in the article that EA attributes the loss in subscriptions to players who had trial memberships and just casually trying the game out leaving.

With that said, As I roam through the game world on my server "'''Assassins of Sion", I can't help but feel like that number could be less even now. My server when I last logged in had only 102 people playing on the entire server. Guild members that I have talked to said that at one point, there were thousands of players on the server at any one time. This leads me to believe that there are even less active players playing. A quick look through the massive server list and you see light server load across most of the servers with only 2 having a high server load. The guild and I have talked about these issues and believe that very soon we will see servers merge together to keep the game populated. At this moment, we have 102 people in my guild, and of those members I have seen 6 to 10 people on. This makes me wonder how much longer can this game survive with so little server population, let alone trying to do a paper on a game culture that seems to be evaporating right before my eyes as I play.

This is why the news article that I talk about above, struck me as important to talk about this week. After many discussions with community members about the way they feel Bioware has been not hearing their desperate cries for changes and updates to the game, I can only guess that if this continues, we will not see this game lost for as long as World of Warcraft has.

The people are the life force of your game and if you neglect them, pretty soon, you will be left with no subscribers and therefore no game at all.

Star Wars loses 400,000 Members

Miles Swanson

And the news is.........

The article titled, "Weight loss made easy withsmartphone apps" is about many of the different options out there for losing weight online.  The article points out a variety of apps including MyFitnesspal, Loseit, and the WeightWatchers apps.  According to the article, these new mobile diet and fitness apps are the new trend in diet/weight loss.  Not only do they make it easy for you to track your calories, they also track your exercise too.  Most importantly, they provide a "gym buddy" or "cyber partner" that is there along the way to help motivate you. 

One reason the article caught my eye is because of the first line.  It said, "Two active children keep 35- year old Melissa Lesch more than busy."   The reason this hit home is because I feel like my 16 year old son keeps my life pretty busy too!  Add in school and a full-time job and at times, I feel really stretched to the limit.  Even though life can keep me pretty busy, one thing I value and deem pretty important is my health!  So that is why MyFitnesspal appealed to me.

The second reason this article caught my attention is because I believe it is true that tracking your calories helps you to make better/healthier food choices throughout the day.  For example, Melissa Lesch, the mother mentioned earlier said, "Her daily meal diary keeps her motivated to stay on track."  This relates to my experience with MyFitnesspal thus far because I have been tracking my exercise and my food daily for the last week and a half.  I have found that it does in fact help me to monitor what I am eating and to make changes throughout the day as necessary. 

Most importantly, this article also relates to the "web culture" aspect of MyFitnesspal.  What exactly does that mean?  I mean that working out and eating right is much more enjoyable when you have a partner or buddy to work with.  MyFitnesspal links me with other people that can help me stay on track and who can help motivate me.  So far, I have made a few friends on MyFitnesspal.  We motivate each other by posting on each others' walls with positive sayings.  For example, "Good job" or "Way to go" is just a few examples of posts that were posted after I came in under my designated calorie count for the day.  I have also read blogs and nutritional tips from other MyFitnesspal members.   

World of Warcraft News Article

Hello Classmates,

Yet another amazing week while playing World of Warcraft. I fee like this has been a great experience with so many different kinds of people. I’ve been having fun leveling and meeting new friends and learning more and more about the game and my guild.

This week we are to locate a news article that talks about our topic. The article that I’ve found is about World of Warcraft wanting to make a mobile game. As I’ve recently found out World of Warcraft already has a mobile application for things such as guild chat, auction house and checking your characters gear.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17456453

At this time it shows World of Warcraft has actually declined in users since 2010 by about 2 million players. Per this article it shows that World of Warcraft has many competitors such as: Starcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic and now Diablo 3.

I’m not to sure how much an online application that gives you the ability to play would bring people back to the game or keep the interested. If they were to do this as a free item a lot of people would love it and jump on the band wagon. At least the hardcore gamers that still play World of Warcraft would. It also explained how some people are using tablets to play the game instead of a pc. I wonder how that actually affects game play because its so graphics intense and I could never play without a mouse to move my character.

Going forward for the game I think having a mobile application where you can actually play might be cool. It also could have a downfall such as kids that play the game that have cell phones in high school might pay less attention to their teachers and more attention to this application during class. This would could lead to bad press for Blizzard (maker of World of Warcraft). But for other people that can go without playing the game for a while it might be fun for them. Maybe people are on vacation but what to see what their friends are up to can actually go on and browse around and play a few rounds of PVP or PVE with their in game friends.

I’m wondering if the next expansion or maybe the release of this mobile application how many people will either leave or come back to the game. Personally I hope it brings people back to the game then it might be more enjoyable with tons more people.

Until next time classmates!

Megan Granger


http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17456453

World of Warcraft Interaction

Hello Classmates,


This week I played a few times with groups. I started out on my own character whom is still a low level and I tried to play some player versus player games.

PVP (player versus player), I went into a battleground and its 10 players of each faction on both sides. 10 on the horde side and 10 on the alliance side. The battleground is called Warsong Gulch and the way to win is to get 3 flag captures before the other team. Also you can not gain a flag if the other team has one. So you have to take out the enemy flag carrier to get your team to gain a flag. I’ve played this before but I’m not to great because it’s really fast paced and crazy.

I went around attempting to take out the opposing faction and my character kept dying. I wasn’t to upset with this because it was still really fun for me. I don’t think anyone else really knew what we were doing besides a few elite people. Even at our low level a lot of people were yelling at us new comers and telling us what to do. Eventually we lost and it took about 10-15 minutes for this to happen with the elitist guy screaming and cussing at everyone. This didn’t seem to good of an experience.

Then I tried out PVE, Player Versus Environment. I went into a dungeon/instance. A dungeon is where you fight many items and get cool gear and items that you character can use to become better. I queued into the random dungeon finder and it brought me to the instance called Ragefire Chasm. This is a instance for levels 10 to 21, so that would mean new comers or people that have made new characters. You are in a party with only 4 other people (so 5 in all), and I explained at the beginning that I’d never been in the place before and everyone was very nice. They explained to just follow them and try to hit everything that I could.  This made it a bit better for me because I could tell some of these people had never been here before either and we were all starting new. It took us about 30 minutes or so to get through it just because we were all confused on where to go but it was very nice and everyone seemed kind.

In conclusion, it seemed that PVE was a better experience than PVP. The people in the instance were thoughtful and cared about your experience and how they were to you. In the PVP they just wanted to yell at you and be elitists.

Till next week :)

Megan Granger

Deviant Art  --- Update  by Vikki


Hi All,
I have been checking out the discussion forums on Deviant Art
I posted some questions to the forum initiating a discussion in the forum reply format. While the forum looks and acts like any forum I have joined,
the responses I got were a little different than I have experienced in the past. I got quiet a few responses that were well thought out and non reactionary. 
In the first five minutes I got twelve replies. The longer my post was up the more replies to my initial post. The level of Internet fluency seems to be fairly high among the Deviant Art members. None of the replies were just a quick reactionary response. All of them had taken the time to add their own stuff that gave me a glimpse of their style. The culture here is welcoming and the discussions I engaged in were worthwhile, relevant, and timely. 

I find it curious that artists are thought of as individuals that are on the fringe, or are filled with all sorts of incredible liberal ideals that are destructive to mainstream society. When ccomparing this forum to other forums at social networking sites, I find the opposite to be the case. 

The culture here seems to take netiquette very seriously. I was reading other blogs comments and communications and I found that the conversations, whether they were about nothing or something fairly important, the respect of individual feelings and ideas was something almost everyone had in mind when they replied to a communication. 

I also found a piece of art that I liked, so I contacted the artist directly.
The artist responded to me with the same welcoming culture I had experienced previously in the forum discussions. 



   Below is an example of a still life photograph:
I know its just a picture of cookies but the lighting and composition are remarkable. I love how the objects in the background are not in focus.
Maybe I am just hungry!
Vikki

Vampires on IRC - Chris Lauer

This week’s post will be all about communication … well, IRC fits the criteria because that’s all IRC is really … communication!

The past two weeks have been fairly fun while using IRC.  The server I’m using has a fun game called Vampire located in a room/channel called #Vampire. It is really fun game to play with other people. The rules are really simple.  If you are the vampire kill everyone else … if you’re not the vampire then you want to kill the vampire … simple right? Actually it’s not, because you have to kill someone each “day” and you won’t know if they are the vampire or not unless you possess the power of the seer, which can see if someone is a vampire or not. I played the vampire game with a group of 6-15 people and found after a certain number of people join you have two vampires which makes things really interesting.  All in all it was very fun game to play and everyone always accused someone else of being the vampire although the winner pretty much came down to who had the most friends or who had greater influence in the game.

After playing the Vampire game I was interested in what other games there were that people would play … this lead me to the trivia game channel called #Trivia.  Yes it’s exactly what it sounds like … a trivia game. I had joined the game channel and started playing right away … this game was blurting out random questions like [09:13] <~TriviaBot>  037.949  Where was the greatest snowfall ever recorded in a single storm ?  … one thing I noticed people do is flood/spam the channel with useless letters as such “akjdfhaklhj”. This tends to ruin the game but what is even worse is when someone has Google upon and searches for all the answers cause then it takes away the trivia part of the game.

After spending some time on those two games I went into a channel that is used for a game I play online … while I knew some of the people in there I noticed that a lot of people just sit there waiting for something to happen … very rarely is there a conversation … although when a conversation does start-up it does last for some time.  There is one thing I do not like about IRC … it is prone to a lot of spam advertisements (which as the server rules state is forbidden). There is also some immature people who like to type profanity for everyone to see which I didn’t like cause well I don’t use it myself so why should they?

All in all this was very fun week for me on IRC cause well I got to play some games and I even won a couple vampire games.