Archive for 'News from Other MMOs'

Korean Gold Farmers Form Trade Association

Korean gold farmers aren’t taking the news of possible governmental regulation lying down. Instead, they’ve formed a trade union to lobby the government, according to veteran MMO designer Raph Koster — who is also the author of the draft Declaration of the Rights of Avatars, a document we at the Herald hold dear. Rise up! [...]

Full Story

Meez Too

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Spaces, Worlds, Planets, Universes, Metaverses, and Wannabee Virtualities.I noticed the kids are using Meez more because they’re bored with MySpace, which they’ve pronounced contemptuously as “gay” or “retarded,” while still declaring TSL as “fun” but “hippy”. They claim they don’t care about Meez very much (not having just scored a [...]

Full Story

More Worlds!

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Planets, Worlds, Universes, Metaverses, and the Eternal One Game-World Sun-God Ra Raph Koster has made a new game! WOOT! Those who remember the game-meister of Star Wars Galaxies and have followed his amazingly rich and insightful interactive blog adventures were thrilled to find out that this enlightened Horus of the [...]

Full Story

Another World…Kinda?

A gallery opening…that isn’t in Second Life. By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Planets, Solar Systems, Universes, Multiverses and Omniverses Wait. I’m pinching myself. I got something in my mailbox from this company called Caligari which makes hugely expensive 3-D stuff which I never looked at too closely, until they…announced an event in a virtual world [...]

Full Story

New Crimes, New Punishments

The New Scientist is running an article in its May 20th edition all about crime and punishment in the virtual world — one of the Herald’s favorite subjects. In fact, most of the piece could have been ripped from the Herald headlines — and probably was. Of course, it features yet another interview with mafia [...]

Full Story

Capital Punishment for RMT in RF Online

Banning, crucifixion and cornfields are too good for gold-traders in the new MMO RF Online. Though the company recently banned more than 150 accounts for botting currency, a couple of game-masters also treated the transgressors to some in-game punishment, climbing into some pimped-out mechsuits to deliver swift one-shots to the criminal characters. Not only that, [...]

Full Story

WoW guild griefs online memorial service for player that dies in real life

This is interesting. As Shoutwire is reporting, an ingame funeral for a popular player was griefed by a guild in World of Warcraft — griefing event consisting of the attacking guild killing most of the funeral party. Of particular interest to me is the discussion that follows in the wake of this event. A lot [...]

Full Story

Cornfields Not Enough for Roma Victor

The devs over at Red Bedlam, makers of the new MMO Roma Victor have come up with a novel new way to punish griefers in their virtual world: Rather than suspend their accounts or banish them to a virtual cornfield for a couple of days, they simply string them up on a cross. [Pic after [...]

Full Story

Mafia Boss Gains Control of SL Stratics

In an ongoing investigation into the news that a Second Life portal was coming to Stratics, the Herald has learned some alarming news: the avatar chosen to manage the soon-to-be-launched Stratics site covering all things Second Life appears to be none other than renowned mob boss (and occasional Herald contributor) Marsellus Wallace.

Full Story

Revisiting Stagecoach Island

paulie Femto created a forum thread yesterday discussing Wells Fargo’s Stagecoach Island project that began using a version of the SecondLife viewer, and has since migrated to ActiveWorlds.  As a former ActiveWorlds user myself (I played during the beta period in mid-to-late 1996 and again from 2000 til 2005-ish), the move interested and shocked me [...]

Full Story