MMO Weekly - 03/09/08

This week in MMO gaming was, as usual, a week of intrigue, a week of controversy, and a week of deeply strange geekiness. You know, the kind of geekiness that makes you cringe, and cry softly into your hands while mumbling, “My people, my people, why do they do these things...” So, without further ado, on to the news! :)

Certainly, the biggest news of the past week has to be PAX. The Penny Arcade Expo is one of the most unusual conventions in all of gaming, as it's run by Gabe and Tycho of PennyArcade.com. For those not familiar, a tiny history lesson: Penny Arcade is a webcomic, offering humorous commentary on gaming in general. Gabe and Tycho started offering a tiny gaming convention several years back, which was attended by 3,500 fans. In the span of a few years, it's grown to 45,000 people. It's currently a huge affair, but somehow retains the very friendly, very laid back feel of the original. Seriously, it's hard to describe...you feel like your at a convention with 45,000 of your friends.

Of course, at PAX, there was quite a bit of MMO news. We got some hands-on time with Champions Online, the much anticipated superhero MMO from Cryptic. It’s made by the same company that makes City of Heroes/Villains, which has proved to be a solid MMO. I must say, however, that Champions does not have the same feel as CoX. It's got a cell shaded art style, and it's not simply a city – the game's setting is both the entire Earth and well beyond. We saw zone after zone after zone of the gameplay, and it fully exploits every setting and theme you can find in the comics. There are zones full of irradiated zombies, zones with mutants, a western ghost town populated by ghosts, there are aliens...you name it. It's definitely not the play-for-an-hour game that CoX is, but much deeper, richer and more epic in scope.

The Wandering Goblin staff scored an on-camera interview with the lead writer for Champions Online, and he turned out to be a fun and funny guy. The interview can be seen in all its epic glory right here.

Our good buddy Leord over at Diii.Net did a bit of digging, and discovered some of the leaked information about Blizzard's Battle.Net 2.0 internet software. Battle.Net is currently Blizzard's internet hookup tool. It allows gamers to play all of Blizzard's non-MMO games online, and it's certainly got its strong points. However, it isn't as cutting edge as some other online tools, and Blizzard is of a mind to change that.

The big deal to MMO gamers is that Battle.Net 2.0 will allow you to easily import and export your friends list from one Blizz game to another. Your enemies list (affectionately called the /ignore list) will also be imported. Even more intriguing, a reputation system is planned, so that your rep will follow you wherever you go. If you're a jerk while playing WoW, other players will be able to tag you with that, and that rep will follow when you change characters, change servers, change games, or change names. It seems that Blizz may be trying to eliminate the 'anonymous factor' that allows moaners, whiners, ninja looters, and other jerks from hiding behind the character/server/game changes that they've taken for granted all these years.

While on the topic of Blizzard's super-giant MMO, there's this: a way to level from 1-60 inside of 20 minutes. It's all perfectly legal and legitimate, too. The details are complicated, but in a nutshell, Blizzard's “buddy system” allows a current player to recruit new players to the game. They get a series of in-game perks, one of which allows the newly recruited player to instantly give levels to the recruiter. The ratio is two to one – a recruited player who got to level 60, would be able to give 30 levels, instantly, to an alt of the recruiter.

There's a video of a player using this system to its maximum potential. The recruiter got two buddies to play WoW, and they leveled their toons to level 60. One day they both decided to use the power-leveling system, gave 30 levels each to the recruiter, and BAM! - he had a level 60 paladin, pretty much instantly.