Blizzard listens to its users

Fortunately, Blizzard backed down from the idea due to the users’ reactions. However, the goal behind Blizzard’s move was to make users accountable for their comments, hoping that it would reduce spam and trolling, a worthy goal. Currently, any player can just create a new account or character on WoW and post anything they want with it, no one will ever know who they really are. This goal can still be achieved without compromising the users’ privacy.

The solution

The solution is to limit access to the main forums only to users that have played a certain number of hours with the account (lets say 5 hours). That way, only serious players will be able to talk in the forums and they won’t be affected by the throwaway accounts used for spam. They could still be affected by trolls (regular players posting crap), but Blizzard is also introducing a voting system so those posts will be weeded out in time. Also, if a player goes too far, Blizzard can just ban the account and the player will need to restart from scratch.

Of course, you want to let newcomers discuss in the forums, so Blizzard would need to provide a beginner’s forums that any user could use. I guess this would be mostly used by people having issues with the game because most of the interesting discussions would be located in the main restricted forums.

Users would keep their anonymity and the spam and trolling in the forums would be reduced, the best of both worlds.

A few examples

The Final Fantasy series is very guilty of this (as are most RPG games made by SquareEnix). While FF doesn’t ask you to collect too much, it makes you want to level-up and max out stuff even though it has nothing to do with the main plot. It usually gives you a near impossible goal to reach and always rewards you greatly if you can get there (if not, there’s always the bragging rights). All the optional bosses are just made up goals that FF fans expect game after game. It’s the little something that distinguishes hardcore players from the rest.

The Final Fantasy series gets an OCD rating of 8/10

I hardly need to explain this one to players who have played this game, but Diablo 2 has a pretty high OCD rating. Diablo 2 had players grinding and doing whatever-runs countless times to get a special unique/rare/set piece of equipment or just leveling up for hours to try to reach level 99 which was hardly better than level 90. Reaching level 99 was hardly worth it (except for bragging rights) and the time you had to invest was crazy: it takes as many experience points to get from 91 to 99 as it takes from 0 to 91. While Torchlight had similar mechanics it didn’t manage to get a similar OCD rating and I give my thanks to Runic Games for this. I don’t really know why there’s such a big difference in their respective OCD ratings though.

Diablo 2’s OCD rating: 9/10 (I haven’t played World of Warcraft because I’m afraid of what it could do to me but it most likely has a similar OCD rating)
Torchlight’s OCD rating: 6/10

OMG I need that to live!

The biggest perpetrator of all are all Korean RPGs. They just require so much grinding it’s not even funny. Korean’s must love it, but the only experience I had (MapleStory) was too much for me (although it did made me waste quite a lot of my time).

Final word

Games with a high OCD rating consume your life and are very addictive. You should be cautious when approaching such games as you may not come back before long.

The game looks great, but the developers keep telling people that it’s aimed at kids. Still, gaming news sites can’t wait to get their hands on this game. I’m a little scared that the game truly is targeted at young kids and that plenty of grown ups are going to be very disappointed when this turns out to be just what it was meant to be.

However, I think this is a great opportunity for the developer to start thinking about branching the game for a more adult audience and deliver a great gaming experience for the adults that grew up playing LEGOs.

Please Net Devil, make it happen, we want a grown up LEGO Universe.

Half-Minute Hero (which was named Yuusha 30) is coming to North America this fall. I talked about this game previously, it’s an RPG with a twist: you have 30 seconds to grind, buy equipment and defeat the final boss. There are many stages and a few other games modes too (one where you play the villain and one where you play a princess surrounded by body guards).

It looks like XSEED Games is doing the job of bringing us this little game that looks like a ton of fun, 30 seconds at the time.

There’s also going to be a demo released tomorrow (september 10th)!

First of all, coming from E3:

Final Fantasy XIV

• FFXIV is the sequel to FFXI in the sense that it is a MMO
• They currently want to make it a global game, meaning no separate servers depending on the region: Japanese players will be able to play with American players
• They are aiming for a release in 2010

Final Fantasy XIII

• Summons are once again a central part of the story. Characters will be attached to one summon (not selectable by players). It is not known if more than one summon will be attached to characters or if all characters will have a summon (or more). The attached summons seem to be fixed by the story.

Final Fantasy VII

• It’s a direct port of the PlayStation game.
• It costs 9.99 US$
• Available for download now (1.32GB required)

And finally, news coming from Nintendo:

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years

• The sequel to the excellent Final Fantasy IV (also known as Final Fantasy II in North America)
• Released on WiiWare at the beginning of the week
• Contains all the episodes (9) from the cellular game from Japan
• Costs 800 Wii points

Sony has just announced that Final Fantasy VII will be available for download over the PlayStation Network today. This is great news for people who have been waiting for a port/remake for so long. So if you have a PSP, you’ll be able to play this classic that changed the role playing genre anywhere you want.

This was just announced at the Nintendo Press conference at the E3. There will be a sequel to the wonderful Golden Sun series on the Nintendo DS. If you haven’t played the Golden Sun games on the Gameboy Advance, I strongly recommend you play them both.

Not much is known about the game yet, but it’s supposed to be released in Spring 2010.

PlayStation LifeStyle has posted a trailer for the next game from Team ICO. If you like games, then check it out. Team ICO has produced 2 of the most beautiful, charming and best games. If you haven’t played ICO or Shadow of the Colossus yet, you should give them a try. Whenever the “game as art” debate comes up, I always think of those two games, they truly are works of art.

Note that the trailer may be two years old. Hopefully, we’ll learn more about this game soon.