You're an early riser Tobold. Can you explain how you came up with your nickname and what it means?

Regards,
DeSlisser
 

You're an early riser Tobold.

Actually the suspiciously high percentage of my posts done at 6:30 AM are those I wrote the day before using Blogger's scheduled posting feature. :)

Can you explain how you came up with your nickname and what it means?

Doesn't mean anything. Once upon a time, in the early 80's, in my first year at university, I found somebody looking for players for Advanced Dungeon & Dragons on the message board. I had played a German roleplaying game called Das Schwarze Auge before, but had no steady group for it. So I got into that AD&D group, and made my first AD&D character, a halfling thief. Looking for a good name for a hobbit, I searched the index of The Lord of the Rings, and found the name Tobold there. Tolkien's Tobold is Tobold Hornblower, the hobbit who introduced pipeweed into the shire.
 

I'd love feedback on this game voice application I'm working on if I may. It's called Voxli and it's a web-based version of Ventrilo / TeamSpeak. The goal was to make voice chat a lot easier to use (no more server setup, just go to the homepage and enter in your room name), and it's free right now as we're in beta. I'd love your guy's thoughts on it (and please delete this comment if it's not appropriate!)

https://voxli.com
 

[i]Tolkien's Tobold is Tobold Hornblower, the hobbit who introduced pipeweed into the shire.[/i]

Thanks for sharing. I was under the impression it was derived from Too Bold. merged into ToBold (Tobold). Too bold could then mean several things. hehe..

Very nice your name has a History and you stuck with it over time. Could you ever imagine changing it?
 

How many languages are you fluent in, Tobold? Just english and german?

Also, give TF2 a try. I will keep bugging you til you do.
 

According to SOE, Vanguard is now going RMT. For me this is a sad move, suggesting that a game that had so many good ideas is on its last legs.

What does everyone else think? Is moving to RMT a sign of failure or the way forward for anyone hoping to make a living in the shadow of the WOW leviathan?
 

How many languages are you fluent in, Tobold? Just english and german?

German, English, and French. Although I can't write French, just read and speak it.
 

While we're on the subject of asking "personal" questions, where does your avatar pic come from?
 

The avatar picture was created for me by somebody from the Magic the Gathering Online BBS, using the hobbit face I used as an avatar there plus the image from a MtG card of a wizard.
 

Meddling Mage I think it is. It's a card designed by the winner of one of the championships in Mtg.
 

Some ideas for things warhammer might have done to help with various population imbalances (Since these imbalances seem a big part of warhammer's problems.)

1. Server structure more like guild wars (I've mentioned this one a lot of different places):

Instead of having lots of individual servers, the servers are created in "clusters" of 4-5 individual servers. When servers empty, characters that pass a loading screen, flightpath, enter the game, etc. are moved together to one server. As servers fill up, characters are automatically spread out over several servers. Server movements are also allowed in a similar manner to Guild wars at certain points on the map. (I'm not sure if this is plausible technology wise, but gameplay wise it hopefully makes sense)

2. "veteranship" (Or some other name)

To deal with order/destruction population imbalances, a new stat would be introduced that reflects a character's experience in different types of battles. This stat would improve damage reduction, healing, damage, and possibly other effects, in PvP and possibly public quests. The stat would measure the amount of enemies a character has faced over some period of time, such as the last /played day (This would include PvP enemies, possibly public quest enemies, but not standard PvE enemies.). The idea of this stat would be to equalize powers of characters in PvP, so that if, say, a server gets a big order/destruction imbalance, the order players will get large improvements to this stat, and could fight more statistically evenly in open PvP (Scenarios would be excluded because the numbers are required ot be balanced.)

3. De-boosting

I'm not sure if lack of lower level characters is a problem at the moment, but if it does become one, this adjustment might help somewhat with it. "De-boosting" would have a higher tier character get reduced to a level appropriate to a lower tier, as well as loosing some higher level skills. The character would get an increase in loot, experience, renown, or other things along those lines, but a lower amount of some some other of loot, experience, renown, etc. (the differing incentives would be to keep players from trying to find the most efficient tier for gaining these things, but would still give reward minded players a reason to do this.)



As an actual blog post, something about the population balances and things warhammer could change seems possible.
 

Edication + MMO's = NASA's new MMO project
http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmo/
 

In MMO's that are not MMORPG's, server balance is hardly an issue. Players normally choose their server each time they login, or have it chosen for them. If you want to play with friends, you just coordinate amongst yourselves where you're going. The central billing server might also facilitate joining friends. Of course that makes perfect sense when you're objective is the first two M's in MMORPG. It's the RP part that makes it desirable to stick to one server. You want to feel like you're part of a world. But WoW and Warhammer don't really have any persistence in the world to speak of. Other than the people, you would not be able to distinguish one server from another.

I wonder if an MMORPG these days should just stick to the old pick-your-server-at-login model. Warhammer is definitely more about the MM than the RP. Even so, smaller communities would still form as players tend towards certain servers by habit. But low-pop servers would vanish all on their own, without having to spend a lot of time on complicated character transfer incentives and procedures. Server outages would have much less impact. Rolling maintenance windows and restarts would be far less disruptive. I think everyone's already gotten over the suspended disbelief of multiple identical worlds (remember the explanations around 'shards' in UO or EQ?) Technically there seems to be almost no downside to it. Have we just gotten into the habit of 'inhabiting' a server?
 

I have been having a hard time playing WoW, or any other game. I'm disappointed because I enjoy video games, and every time I sit in front of my pc or ps3, I just don't feel like playing. Though I still read blogs and forums daily. Anyone else have a game burnout feeling?
 

I have been having a hard time playing WoW, or any other game. I'm disappointed because I enjoy video games, and every time I sit in front of my pc or ps3, I just don't feel like playing. Though I still read blogs and forums daily. Anyone else have a game burnout feeling?

I get that feeling from time to time, where I'm just not interested in playing anything.

If you're looking for advice, my tendency is to just let myself be burned out for awhile, than find more things to do. There really isn't any morality reason, or other reason, to force myself to play games if I don't want to,and it wouldn't matter that much if I simply stayed burned out. However usually what happens is that something will jog my mind on some computer game, I'll want to try it out, start playing again, and start enjoying computer games again.

If you weren't looking for advice, I don't really have much else to say, but I do get burned out in general from time to time, which doesn't reduce my enjoyment of life unless I find nothing else to fill up the time.