As long as I am in the Burning Crusade beta, I am going to write a series of blog posts about the expansion. These are basically spoilers, so if you don't like spoilers, look away. But for the rest of you they might serve as useful hints, and even give you some ideas how to prepare already today for the expansion. I'll write a number of "BC Journal" entries with my observations. But whenever possible I'll group the information on a single subject into one post, for easier reference. This blog entry is about everything I could find out about low level jewelcrafting.
Jewelcrafting can be learned from trainers in the new Draenei and Blood Elf cities, I couldn't find a jewelcrafting trainer in the old cities. As I was playing a Horde character, I flew to Light Hope's Chapel in Eastern Plaguelands, and rode to the Blood Elf city of Silvermoon. Later I found out that there is a teleport between Undercity and Silvermoon, which made traveling back and forth a lot easier. The journeyman, expert, and master trainer are all in one spot, no idea yet where the artisan trainer is hiding.
When you learn apprentice jewelcrafting, you get two new skills in your spellbook: jewelcrafting and prospecting. You also get the first basic recipes. Prospecting is the art of turning ores into gems. Only basic ores, like copper, tin, iron, etc., can be turned into gems. Rare ores like silver and gold, or quest ores like incendite are not prospectable. Prospecting destroys 5 ores, and always gives you one worthless metal powder, plus between zero and two gems. The gems are of the type which you could also find when mining that metal, so Tigerseye and Malachite for copper, and so on. Prospecting is important, because jewelcrafting needs lots of gems, more than normal mining can find. But as prospecing destroys a lot of ore, it makes jewelcrafting use quite a large amount of resources.
As I had already heard about ores being needed, I came to the BC beta with 160 copper ore and 160 tin ore in my bags. That turned out to be not enough. Because besides destroying the ores for gems, you also need lots of metal bars to make either intermediary products or final jewelry. I ended up spending many hours in the beta mining; which was easy, because everybody else was in the new zones, and I had places like the Wetlands or Hillsbrad for me alone to mine. If you plan to do jewelcrafting when the expansion comes out, you should stock at least 200 each of copper and tin, plus gems and silver. I got my jewelcrafting up to 110 before I needed the first iron, but unfortunately the first iron item also needed large fangs, and I wasn't prepared for that. All other items I could skill up with either needed silver, shadowgems, or moonstone, none of which are very easy to find, and so I'm blocked at 110 right now.
You might have heard about socketed items and gems to put into these sockets being made by jewelcrafting. Well, not at the lower levels. There don't seem to be any socketed items below level 60, nor does it seem that a jewelcrafter can do any socketable gems before 225 skill. I assume that is something the artisan trainer teaches you, the one I haven't found yet.
The main product at jewelcrafting up to 110 are rings, plus some necklaces. As low level rings and necklaces aren't very common up to now, jewelcrafting will be useful to equip low level characters with jewelry. I heard, but couldn't confirm, that there will be recipes for enchanters to enchant jewelry, adding further bonuses.
The other product of jewelcrafting is statues, which are made from the stones (rough stone, coarse stone, heavy stone, etc.) which you find when mining. 10 stones make one statue, which is a clickable object in your inventory. When you use it, you summon a cute mini earth elemental pet, which heals you for a couple of seconds. Not by very much, but might be useful to classes which don't have other combat healing methods available. Unfortunately the statues are bind on pickup, only the jewelcrafter himself can use them.
Up to now I'm not terribly impressed by jewelcrafting. Lots of people will try it, just because it is new, but just like the other item-producing tradeskills, the quality of the crafted items isn't all that great. I was able to make one blue ring, with good stats for its level. It was interesting because when you make it, you don't know what stats it will have. You get a ring with a random "of the animal" name. I got a "of the tiger" ring, with +4 agility, +3 strength. The ring was labeled "Unique - equipped", meaning that I could have several in my inventory, but could only equip one of them.
To explore jewelcrafting further, I loaded up my Alliance priest with tons of metals and gems, and copied him to the BC beta. You can only copy 4 characters, and copying takes 2 days, so it will take a while before I can tell you more about higher level jewelcrafting, if I ever get there. But I have decided that my Horde priest, who currently has mining and tailoring, will not give up tailoring to learn jewelcrafting. I think I will take one of my level 40ish alts and make him a jewelcrafter instead, sending him the metals mined by my priest. This is not really a "must have" tradeskill.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Mudflation and raiding
The Burning Crusade is throwing a long shadow, and already has a measurable effect on World of Warcraft, in spite of not being expected to go live for another 6 weeks or so. The reason is the beta, and tons of websites already posting the items you will be able to get in the expansion. And there are lots of items in the expansion which are significantly better than the loot you can get from Blackwing Lair, and a lot easier to get. Mudflation at its finest, the new items of the expansion devaluating the old raid loot.
Both Friday and Saturday I stood in BWL with 30 to 35 people of my guild, and not enough people of the right classes to even attempt Razorgore. Friday we ended up going to Molten Core, which was lucky, because I got my Gloves of Prophecy there, and now have 6 Prophecy, 2 Transcendence. Nice! But some guild members were online and simply refused to come to BWL, citing that they didn't want to bother wiping repeatedly in BWL any more, if they could get better loot easier in Burning Crusade.
And of course besides the loot effect, some people simply don't feel like playing the "old" World of Warcraft any more, now that the new one is on the horizon. Either they are playing the beta (like I do), or they are taking a break until the expansion comes out.
The effect on 40-man raids is profound. Guilds are usually designed in a way that they don't have too many reserves for raiding, that the 40-man raids just fill up. If some people burn out, take a break, play the beta, or just wait for better loot from BC, the remaining guild members often can't get enough people for the more challenging encounters together.
Both Friday and Saturday I stood in BWL with 30 to 35 people of my guild, and not enough people of the right classes to even attempt Razorgore. Friday we ended up going to Molten Core, which was lucky, because I got my Gloves of Prophecy there, and now have 6 Prophecy, 2 Transcendence. Nice! But some guild members were online and simply refused to come to BWL, citing that they didn't want to bother wiping repeatedly in BWL any more, if they could get better loot easier in Burning Crusade.
And of course besides the loot effect, some people simply don't feel like playing the "old" World of Warcraft any more, now that the new one is on the horizon. Either they are playing the beta (like I do), or they are taking a break until the expansion comes out.
The effect on 40-man raids is profound. Guilds are usually designed in a way that they don't have too many reserves for raiding, that the 40-man raids just fill up. If some people burn out, take a break, play the beta, or just wait for better loot from BC, the remaining guild members often can't get enough people for the more challenging encounters together.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Reader appreciation
Of course I appreciate all the readers of this blog, as a blog without readers would be kind of pointless. Even more I appreciate those of you who actively participate in the discussion, and leave comments and feedback, whether you agree with my opinions or not.
But the grand prix title of "most appreciated reader" goes to the one guy who mailed me his spare beta key for the European Burning Crusade beta. Thanks a lot, mate, that was very nice. And it will give me something to write for the next days or even weeks, the NDA having been lifted.
I am currently in the process of downloading the game client, which will probably take still until tomorrow or later. The client is 2 Gigabyte large, and after one night of downloading I'm just at 18% completed. I found a mirror of the English (GB) client on Curse-gaming, but it is broken, or can't cope with the downloads.
Apparently there are 100,000 beta testers for Europe alone. This places this beta somewhere in the middle between a closed and an open beta, being invite only like a closed beta, but having a number of players more similar to an open one. There being only 4 realms, I wonder whether how playable it will be.
But the grand prix title of "most appreciated reader" goes to the one guy who mailed me his spare beta key for the European Burning Crusade beta. Thanks a lot, mate, that was very nice. And it will give me something to write for the next days or even weeks, the NDA having been lifted.
I am currently in the process of downloading the game client, which will probably take still until tomorrow or later. The client is 2 Gigabyte large, and after one night of downloading I'm just at 18% completed. I found a mirror of the English (GB) client on Curse-gaming, but it is broken, or can't cope with the downloads.
Apparently there are 100,000 beta testers for Europe alone. This places this beta somewhere in the middle between a closed and an open beta, being invite only like a closed beta, but having a number of players more similar to an open one. There being only 4 realms, I wonder whether how playable it will be.
Epic flying mount, just 8000 gold
The beta for Burning Crusade has started. I assume there is a NDA, but there is a lot of information leaking. Among them I found this forum entry with the cost of the riding skill needed for normal and epic flying mounts. The expert riding skill (225) costs 2,000 gold, and the artisan riding skill (300) costs 5,000 gold. And of course you will have to have paid 100 gold for the apprentice riding skill (75) and 1000 gold for the journeyman riding skill (150) before you can learn the higher skills. Learning riding to 300 to be able to ride an epic flying mount thus costs 8,100 gold base cost. And that only buys you the skill, you still will need to either buy or quest for the flying mount that goes with it. Note that all these are *base* prices, you usually get a 10% rebate for being honored with your faction. Currently there is also a 10% rebate for being at least rank 3 in PvP, but it isn't sure whether we will lose that one after the expansion totally remodels the PvP honor system.
If a normal flying mount is sufficient for you, you only pay 3,100 gold base cost, or 2,790 gold after the 10% rebate. If you already have a riding skill of 150, from having bought an epic mount before the patch 1.12.1, or from buying the riding skill now, you will "only" need to spend 1,800 gold after rebate for the skill necessary to fly the normal flying mount. But even that is far more than the average WoW player is likely to have. And as at least the normal flying mount is needed to access certain zones and dungeons in the Burning Crusade, lots of people will have a lot of farming to do for cash. While you can probably earn more gold per hour at level 70 than currently at level 60, farming 1,800 gold will still take many hours. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people will "outsource" that farming, and buy the gold from professional gold farmers. I don't know if there are any publicly traded gold farming companies, but now would be the time to buy shares in them.
If a normal flying mount is sufficient for you, you only pay 3,100 gold base cost, or 2,790 gold after the 10% rebate. If you already have a riding skill of 150, from having bought an epic mount before the patch 1.12.1, or from buying the riding skill now, you will "only" need to spend 1,800 gold after rebate for the skill necessary to fly the normal flying mount. But even that is far more than the average WoW player is likely to have. And as at least the normal flying mount is needed to access certain zones and dungeons in the Burning Crusade, lots of people will have a lot of farming to do for cash. While you can probably earn more gold per hour at level 70 than currently at level 60, farming 1,800 gold will still take many hours. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people will "outsource" that farming, and buy the gold from professional gold farmers. I don't know if there are any publicly traded gold farming companies, but now would be the time to buy shares in them.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Legal cheating with third-party software
In World of Warcraft as in most other MMORPG the use of third-party software which helps you win battles in PvE and/or PvP is a bannable offence. With one notable exception: voice-chat software like Teamspeak or Ventrilo. Although this sort of third-party software gives your team a huge advantage in PvP, and helps a lot in PvE raiding, it is legal. Mostly because it is hard to detect, as it doesn't directly mess with the game's data, like a bot software would do. This being so, I think that game companies should integrate voice-chat into their games, to level the playing field.
My first guild in World of Warcraft raided without using voice chat. Some people were absolutely opposed to voice chat, and nobody had the knowledge and the hardware to run a Teamspeak or Ventrilo server in the background. When I switched guilds and started raiding with the new guild, I found they were using Teamspeak. I installed TS on my laptop (thus it doesn't affect the performance of the PC I'm playing on), and noticed immediately how much smoother raids go when you have voice chat. Especially aggro management becomes easier with somebody on TS announing "go DPS" and "stop DPS" at the appropriate moments. Voice-chat also beats any boss mod hands down in announcing who is the bomb at Baron Geddon, or similar important announcements.
Move to PvP, and the advantage of using voice-chat becomes so big, it isn't even funny any more. On the smaller battlegrounds in World of Warcraft the "premade" teams, using voice-chat, rule absolutely. They just need one guy to guard every flag they own in AB, calling in their mobile team via TS as soon as the opponents try to attack. If you can communicate quickly where the enemy is, it becomes easy to always outnumber him.
If a third-party software makes such a big difference to a game's battles, there are only two things a game company can do: Ban it, or integrate it. Banning it is easy when the third-party software using game commands, which is how Blizzard is able to ban Decursive and similar software. But voice-chat runs completely in parallel, without touching the game. And as I said, my Teamspeak runs on my laptop, so even if Blizzard's Warden spyware would be able to detect Teamspeak, I would still come up clean. So I think Blizzard's best option would be to integrate voice-chat into World of Warcraft, for example as part of the WoW 3.0 expansion, a year after the Burning Crusade.
A number of MMORPG companies are already going that way. Turbine does it, for DDO and LOTRO. EVE online is going to integrate Vivox voice-chat software into their game. NCSoft's Auto Assault has it. And integrated voice-chat has also been announced for Tabula Rasa, and a number of other upcoming games.
Now nobody will be forced to use voice-chat when he doesn't want to. But removing the technical hurdles to using it and integrating voice-chat directly into the game is a good thing. World of Warcraft already puts everybody on a battleground into one raid group. Putting them into one voice-chat channel automatically as well would be easy. It would then just be up to the players whether they actually wanted to coordinate their attacks that way.
My first guild in World of Warcraft raided without using voice chat. Some people were absolutely opposed to voice chat, and nobody had the knowledge and the hardware to run a Teamspeak or Ventrilo server in the background. When I switched guilds and started raiding with the new guild, I found they were using Teamspeak. I installed TS on my laptop (thus it doesn't affect the performance of the PC I'm playing on), and noticed immediately how much smoother raids go when you have voice chat. Especially aggro management becomes easier with somebody on TS announing "go DPS" and "stop DPS" at the appropriate moments. Voice-chat also beats any boss mod hands down in announcing who is the bomb at Baron Geddon, or similar important announcements.
Move to PvP, and the advantage of using voice-chat becomes so big, it isn't even funny any more. On the smaller battlegrounds in World of Warcraft the "premade" teams, using voice-chat, rule absolutely. They just need one guy to guard every flag they own in AB, calling in their mobile team via TS as soon as the opponents try to attack. If you can communicate quickly where the enemy is, it becomes easy to always outnumber him.
If a third-party software makes such a big difference to a game's battles, there are only two things a game company can do: Ban it, or integrate it. Banning it is easy when the third-party software using game commands, which is how Blizzard is able to ban Decursive and similar software. But voice-chat runs completely in parallel, without touching the game. And as I said, my Teamspeak runs on my laptop, so even if Blizzard's Warden spyware would be able to detect Teamspeak, I would still come up clean. So I think Blizzard's best option would be to integrate voice-chat into World of Warcraft, for example as part of the WoW 3.0 expansion, a year after the Burning Crusade.
A number of MMORPG companies are already going that way. Turbine does it, for DDO and LOTRO. EVE online is going to integrate Vivox voice-chat software into their game. NCSoft's Auto Assault has it. And integrated voice-chat has also been announced for Tabula Rasa, and a number of other upcoming games.
Now nobody will be forced to use voice-chat when he doesn't want to. But removing the technical hurdles to using it and integrating voice-chat directly into the game is a good thing. World of Warcraft already puts everybody on a battleground into one raid group. Putting them into one voice-chat channel automatically as well would be easy. It would then just be up to the players whether they actually wanted to coordinate their attacks that way.
WoW Journal - 12-October-2006
Logging on yesterday, after the weekly maintenance during which PvP ranks are calculated, I found out that I had failed to reach the Sergeant's rank that I had wanted for my Horde priest. I just made it to Grunt, one rank below, but with over 90% of the points needed for the next level already. While I did more PvP than my last character reaching Sergeant, my guess is that cross-server battlegrounds have made PvP much more popular, and on the honor ranking relative scale that means you need to do much more PvP for the same rank. And of course you don't even know how much more is necessary to reach a certain rank. God, will I be happy when this stupid system disappears with WoW 2.0 aka the Burning Crusade expansion.
Well, I still want to be Sergeant, due to the 10% reduction of vendor prices, even if I am not sure whether I will keep that reduction in WoW 2.0. So my priest did some more PvP. To keep things interesting, I decided to do the quest which requires you to collect three honor marks from each of the three battlegrounds. That involved losing three long battles in Alterac Valley, winning an extremely short Warsong Gulch battle, and winning a medium length Arathi Basin battle. The advantage of doing the quest was a nice cash payout, plus over 2000 bonus honor points. I then played some more WSG and AB battles, having already done more than enough AV battles.
I'm now even more puzzled than when I asked why the Horde loses AV most of the time. I only lost one WSG battle, and that was with a Horde pickup group facing a single-guild Alliance group which was probably using Teamspeak, which is an immediate win condition. All the other WSG battles, Horde pickup group against Alliance pickup group, were won by the Horde, and often 3-0. The Horde also dominated all the Arathi Basin battles I participated in, I haven't lost a single one yet. So how can it be that Horde is so bad on one battleground, but wins easily on the other two? Why should the Horde be better at organizing small groups, and the Alliance at organizing big groups? I thought that maybe in WSG it would be the shamans in ghost wolf form being the best flag carriers, but actually due to my epic horse, bubble, self-heal, and psychic scream it was often me who was carrying the flag in the WSG battles I participated in. And in most cases that happened more or less unopposed, me just riding to the Alliance stronghold, grabbing the flag, and running back casting a few spells to protect myself from the few defenders. Boring.
In spite of winning, I don't like Warsong Gulch at all. There doesn't seem to be any strategy behind it, just people randomly running around until somebody grabs a flag and carries it home. And the WSG battles are just too short. Alterac Valley is better, even if I always lose there, at least there is something like a front moving back and forth, with people gathering at different battle objectives, and trying to balance attack and defence. But my favorite is probably Arathi Basin. It has just the right length of battles, a good number of battle objectives, and a good mix of offensive and defensive encounters. Unlike AV, the battle in AB can't really stall, somebody is always edging closer to the win. But unlike WSG the win always takes some time, because it is hard to keep control of more than 3 resource points.
I will do a bit more PvP with my priest, just to get the points I think I need to be sure to make rank 3. But as a long-term occupation PvP in its current form doesn't hold enough interest for me. Usually both sides are more or less unorganized, and individual encounters are decided more by who has more players at the location than by any clever tactics. As getting your fellow players to coordinate more is a nigh impossible task, the whole exercise is far too chaotic for me. Which still leaves me asking myself how to pass the time before the Burning Crusade comes out.
Well, I still want to be Sergeant, due to the 10% reduction of vendor prices, even if I am not sure whether I will keep that reduction in WoW 2.0. So my priest did some more PvP. To keep things interesting, I decided to do the quest which requires you to collect three honor marks from each of the three battlegrounds. That involved losing three long battles in Alterac Valley, winning an extremely short Warsong Gulch battle, and winning a medium length Arathi Basin battle. The advantage of doing the quest was a nice cash payout, plus over 2000 bonus honor points. I then played some more WSG and AB battles, having already done more than enough AV battles.
I'm now even more puzzled than when I asked why the Horde loses AV most of the time. I only lost one WSG battle, and that was with a Horde pickup group facing a single-guild Alliance group which was probably using Teamspeak, which is an immediate win condition. All the other WSG battles, Horde pickup group against Alliance pickup group, were won by the Horde, and often 3-0. The Horde also dominated all the Arathi Basin battles I participated in, I haven't lost a single one yet. So how can it be that Horde is so bad on one battleground, but wins easily on the other two? Why should the Horde be better at organizing small groups, and the Alliance at organizing big groups? I thought that maybe in WSG it would be the shamans in ghost wolf form being the best flag carriers, but actually due to my epic horse, bubble, self-heal, and psychic scream it was often me who was carrying the flag in the WSG battles I participated in. And in most cases that happened more or less unopposed, me just riding to the Alliance stronghold, grabbing the flag, and running back casting a few spells to protect myself from the few defenders. Boring.
In spite of winning, I don't like Warsong Gulch at all. There doesn't seem to be any strategy behind it, just people randomly running around until somebody grabs a flag and carries it home. And the WSG battles are just too short. Alterac Valley is better, even if I always lose there, at least there is something like a front moving back and forth, with people gathering at different battle objectives, and trying to balance attack and defence. But my favorite is probably Arathi Basin. It has just the right length of battles, a good number of battle objectives, and a good mix of offensive and defensive encounters. Unlike AV, the battle in AB can't really stall, somebody is always edging closer to the win. But unlike WSG the win always takes some time, because it is hard to keep control of more than 3 resource points.
I will do a bit more PvP with my priest, just to get the points I think I need to be sure to make rank 3. But as a long-term occupation PvP in its current form doesn't hold enough interest for me. Usually both sides are more or less unorganized, and individual encounters are decided more by who has more players at the location than by any clever tactics. As getting your fellow players to coordinate more is a nigh impossible task, the whole exercise is far too chaotic for me. Which still leaves me asking myself how to pass the time before the Burning Crusade comes out.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Mainstream duopoly
The Economist has an article about Second Life (subscribers only), labeled a "special report" and being 3 pages long in the print magazine. I've seen Second Life discussed in Businessweek and the New York Times. In fact it is hard to tell which of the two games, Second Life or World of Warcraft, is receiving more media attention. But fact is that if you open a non-gaming magazine or newspaper and find an article about virtual online worlds, it will be either about WoW or Second Life. No other game ever gets a headline, they might just be mentioned somewhere in a list.
The surprising thing in this is that Second Life isn't a terribly successful MMO. While it has 750,000 "residents", this is just the number of people that have a free account. The number of paying subscribers, aka landowners, is just 25,000. And the number of concurrent users is a measly 9,000. Even Dungeons and Dragons Online has more players and monthly revenue, but never gets mentioned in a print magazine. So why is Second Life part of the mainstream duopoly?
The answer is probably the interesting business model of Second Life, which in a way is full in the famous "Web 2.0" trend. Users create content and sell it to other users, with the company owning the platform getting a share. The top ten Second Life entrepreneurs are reported to make an average income of $200,000 a year. With numbers like these, people easily oversee the fact that with just 9,000 players online at any given time, Second Life isn't quite the shining example justifying big investments in the Web 2.0. The big incomes are often made by virtual land speculation, the revenue from actually creating and selling virtual items is a lot smaller.
But in a way the duopoly is justified, because World of Warcraft and Second Life pretty much cover the two extremes of the game vs. world scale on which all MMO must find their place. WoW is very much a game, with up to now very little world aspects. There isn't even player housing, no way for a player to leave a permanent mark on the world. Second Life is the extreme world type MMO, with no game content except for user-created games. Here the user can't slay dragons and level up to ultimate power, but he can rent a piece of land, create his own dream home, and fill it with his own creations of virtual furniture, or buy these from other players. Many other games are somewhere in the middle between these two extremes, being more game than Second Life, but more world than World of Warcraft.
While game critics often like world aspects in MMO, the MMOs leaning more towards the game side have traditionally sold a lot better. Fact is that most people either aren't very creative, or prefer to express their creativity in the real world. Very few houses in MMOs like Star Wars Galaxies or Ultima Online were actually worth looking at. I never played Second Life, but I am pretty certain that besides a few shining examples, there is also a lot of user created garbage in that game. A more game like MMO, where most of the content is created by developers and is subject to a certain quality control, usually ends up being nicer to interact with. And the game aspect of killing monsters, gaining experience points and levels, and looting stuff, is a lot easier to digest after a hard day at work than the task of creating new content. We are still far from a Web 2.0 world MMO beating out a game in the number of users, and we might never get there.
The surprising thing in this is that Second Life isn't a terribly successful MMO. While it has 750,000 "residents", this is just the number of people that have a free account. The number of paying subscribers, aka landowners, is just 25,000. And the number of concurrent users is a measly 9,000. Even Dungeons and Dragons Online has more players and monthly revenue, but never gets mentioned in a print magazine. So why is Second Life part of the mainstream duopoly?
The answer is probably the interesting business model of Second Life, which in a way is full in the famous "Web 2.0" trend. Users create content and sell it to other users, with the company owning the platform getting a share. The top ten Second Life entrepreneurs are reported to make an average income of $200,000 a year. With numbers like these, people easily oversee the fact that with just 9,000 players online at any given time, Second Life isn't quite the shining example justifying big investments in the Web 2.0. The big incomes are often made by virtual land speculation, the revenue from actually creating and selling virtual items is a lot smaller.
But in a way the duopoly is justified, because World of Warcraft and Second Life pretty much cover the two extremes of the game vs. world scale on which all MMO must find their place. WoW is very much a game, with up to now very little world aspects. There isn't even player housing, no way for a player to leave a permanent mark on the world. Second Life is the extreme world type MMO, with no game content except for user-created games. Here the user can't slay dragons and level up to ultimate power, but he can rent a piece of land, create his own dream home, and fill it with his own creations of virtual furniture, or buy these from other players. Many other games are somewhere in the middle between these two extremes, being more game than Second Life, but more world than World of Warcraft.
While game critics often like world aspects in MMO, the MMOs leaning more towards the game side have traditionally sold a lot better. Fact is that most people either aren't very creative, or prefer to express their creativity in the real world. Very few houses in MMOs like Star Wars Galaxies or Ultima Online were actually worth looking at. I never played Second Life, but I am pretty certain that besides a few shining examples, there is also a lot of user created garbage in that game. A more game like MMO, where most of the content is created by developers and is subject to a certain quality control, usually ends up being nicer to interact with. And the game aspect of killing monsters, gaining experience points and levels, and looting stuff, is a lot easier to digest after a hard day at work than the task of creating new content. We are still far from a Web 2.0 world MMO beating out a game in the number of users, and we might never get there.
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