-
A history of griefing: gamers who ruin your day for kicks Sometimes it’s purely for fun, sometimes it’s to make a point, and sometimes it’s even to make a profit.
You’re in the zombie nightmare of DayZ and about to be eaten by one of the charging undead when suddenly a helicopter appears. Its pilots – and simply owning a helicopter lets you know they’re big shots – gun down your pursuer and offer you a lift. What you don’t know is that instead of flying you to safety, your destination is the tiny, featureless Schadenfreude Island some 15km off the main coast of Chernarus. The only reason they’ve saved you is for the amusement of knowing you’re condemned to stand there until you waste away, and that they were smart enough to fool you. Griefing: it comes in many…
You May Also Like
17 years ago today, a wild Pikachu virus appeared! W32.Pokey.Worm was not very effective...
The 10 most hilarious Destiny exploits From fantastically cheesy ways to kill bosses to painless ways to level up, these are some of the most hilarious exploits Destiny players have discovered.
Why you pay what you pay for video games We can often feel short-changed when it comes to buying video games, especially in the UK. So what exactly determines what you pay?
-
Meet the whale who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on the MMO Black Desert Online "I love how we just casually talk about spending almost the entire cost of a full ride at Yale university on a video game."
Heedun yesterday posted a YouTube interview with Estimate, the whale who has spent $160k in microtransactions on the MMORPG Black Desert Online. Estimate is very open about the fact that he’s paying to win and gives the us lowdown on the whole thing. Watch this video on YouTube Useful timestamps: 04:30 How much he spent in the game 07:30 Why he P2Ws 14:00 Regrets 17:58 P2W in Other Games 24:00 RMT in BDO 30:30 How to P2W “he’s not a whale, he is a f**king leviathan” – YouTube comment.
You May Also Like
Hacker receives developer-sanctioned death penalty in Guild Wars 2 Sweet justice.
Arming the citizens of GTA V leads to absolute chaos Modders have patched in the 'Crazy Peds' cheat from San Andreas.
Turn your Excel spreadsheet into an RPG with Arena.Xlsm Just because you’re stuck in Excel all day doesn’t mean you can’t do some questing.
-
Gabe Newell reveals he was an undercover World of Warcraft gold farmer Just for research, you understand.
Gabe Newell got the idea for the Steam Workshop during his time working as a gold farmer in World of Warcraft. Speaking to Edge Magazine, Valve’s CEO said he managed to bring in a decent hourly wage – and worked out a concept that would help some people make significant amounts of money. “We were always used to thinking about games as entertainment experiences, but then we started thinking of them as productivity platforms,” says Newell. “As a sort of proof-of-concept, I decided to be a World of Warcraft gold farmer for a while. I was making $20 an hour farming gold. I was making what was a spectacular wage for…
You May Also Like
Leave me alone: speaking out against the rise of co-op The once separate worlds of singleplayer and multiplayer are merging – but there's nothing wrong with playing alone.
Kotaku is killing video game journalism When Kotaku introduced ‘social justice’ to gaming coverage, it all went to hell. Why can't we just play?
The history of Wing Commander Wing Commander’s paved the way to the modern video game industry, and its design continues to influence game development to the present day.
-
Returning to Runescape, over one decade on We’re going back... back to the browser!
Back in the distant past of 2004, when Avril Lavigne was still in her heyday and Green Day made me feel like an American Idiot in spite of living on the English south coast, I started playing my first MMORPG. I was around thirteen years old, and I remember being introduced to the wonders of Runescape during a lunchtime spent quietly hidden away on a school library computer. It was a MMORPG that ran entirely in-browser, and as such could be made to work on our ancient and technologically-limited school computers. Someone in my class had been passing around a proxy server access file on a flash stick, meaning that…
You May Also Like
Why Super Mario Bros. 3 is still a masterpiece Before Mario had a World, he had the biggest stage on Earth – and played the part to perfection.
Five standalone ‘sidequels’ that are far better than their main series The bitesize masterpieces that edge out their main series counterparts.
The story of Second Life’s long-abandoned Duran Duran universe No ordinary world.
-
Destiny 2 is practically impossible to play if you’re a parent Bungie can do hunters, titans and warlocks alright, but it really struggles with the parent class.
I had a baby nine months ago. As you might expect, this has significantly changed my relationship with video games, at least temporarily. It has made the Nintendo Switch my favorite console of all time, because I can play it both on the big screen on the occasional evening and in my hands during naptime/train journeys/stolen moments hiding in the bathroom whilst my partner deals with the baby. It has also drastically reduced the time available to me to play games — which, given that it is literally my job to know about games, is a smidge inconvenient. Most of all it has erased my ability to join in with…
You May Also Like
The Mission: the most bizarre soccer game ever made "Once you have acquired the ball it is used as your main weapon against the Ninjas."
From EA QA to Pokémon Go and beyond: the incredible career of E. Daniel Arey He's helped design some of gaming's greatest successes, and is just getting started.
The spooky, gory, and gorgeous worlds of DOOM Sometimes, it pays to shoot pictures instead of demons.
-
Love in a time of Warcraft Sarah found herself cast as the Yoko Ono of WoW, being blamed for the dissolution of what has been a successful raiding guild.
Heidi met John playing Final Fantasy XIV. They were part of the same Free Company, and would often help each other out with quests. Getting to know each other, the pair soon realized they had plenty in common, and began to spend more time together. “Seeing his name light up when he logged on brought a huge smile to my face,” says Heidi. John later tells me that he spent weeks carrying his laptop around at work or college on the off-chance she signed in. Eventually, John drove from Tennessee to North Carolina to meet Heidi in person. They spent a week together in which time they realized they weren’t…
You May Also Like
The history of Wing Commander Wing Commander’s paved the way to the modern video game industry, and its design continues to influence game development to the present day.
Woke at the GDC The Game Developers Conference is now about how games are to blame for every social ill — real or imagined.
How great puzzle games deconstruct our world The Witness, Gorogoa and Baba Is You reflect the societies they come from.
-
The story of Second Life’s long-abandoned Duran Duran universe No ordinary world.
The stories of Second Life and Duran Duran mirror each other in a strange kind of way. At their height, both enjoyed immense popularity, and both have slowly slipped out of the spotlight in recent times. Linden Lab’s life simulator was released back in 2003 and boasted a million regular users in its prime. Duran Duran, meanwhile, emerged when the New Romantics ruled the airwaves, and their albums went triple platinum. These days, neither commands the headlines they once did. In a way, it seems prudent that these two former titans of pop culture would sooner or later cross paths, and the Duran Duran Universe, an official Second Life world dedicated to the band, was the result.…
You May Also Like
The history of Wing Commander Wing Commander’s paved the way to the modern video game industry, and its design continues to influence game development to the present day.
10 hilariously offensive Steam games you aren’t allowed to buy any more In memoriam the best of the worst banned games in Steam's storied history.
Discord has a furry pedophile problem 'Furry' pedophile groups survived the Discord purges despite hundreds of reports. Then activists uncovered a nest of furry admins within Discord, Inc itself.
-
The World of Warcraft legacy server that is no more In closing Nostalrius, Blizzard finds itself the bad guy despite having the law on its side.
World Of Warcraft is a living place. With each expansion it sails onwards, leaving old players behind as new ideas, faces and philosophies keep the 11-year-old MMO current. However, some players would prefer to step back in time and wander the world they knew, like revisiting the street you grew up on. Until April 10, Nostalrius existed to do just that. It was the largest private server running WOW patch 1.12 – the final build of the base game, free from expansions and adulteration. Nostalgia was so strong that 800,000 people registered Nostalrius accounts, and 150,000 were active players. This took place without the approval of Activision Blizzard. The Battle.net…
You May Also Like
The lost Call of Duty mode worth saving from extinction 50,000 people used to play here. Now it's a ghost town.
Five standalone ‘sidequels’ that are far better than their main series The bitesize masterpieces that edge out their main series counterparts.
Eight things that just don’t make sense in the Pokemon universe Twenty years of backtracking and flip flopping until there are more contradictions than a M. Night Shyamalan movie about time travel.
-
World of Warcraft’s Goldshire inn has been built brick for brick in the Warcraft film It's deeply weird to see Lion's Pride Inn brought to life with real wood and metal.
As part of the new Warcraft film, some very familiar locations of the game have been recreated in reality – or well, film sets. One of the areas of the film where we’ll see members of the Alliance meet is the Goldshire Inn. Watch this video on YouTube Watch this video on YouTube It’s an uncanny recreation: Well, there are fewer people dancing on the tables in their undies in the film version. Hopefully that will change in post. There’s an Easter egg right by the door that says ‘Kobold’s Wanted’, a nod to the early game quests that see you hunting down the blighters. If there’s this much attention to detail in…
You May Also Like
Catacombs: the inside story of Square Enix’ canceled shooter It’s always a great shame when a game is cancelled, but much more so when a genuine original is lost.
A history of griefing: gamers who ruin your day for kicks Sometimes it’s purely for fun, sometimes it’s to make a point, and sometimes it’s even to make a profit.
The making of Firewatch The story behind one of 2016's most unusual, human and thought-provoking games.
-
The secret to the success of the greatest MMO of them all Vanilla World of Warcraft fed on the blood, toil, tears and sweat of its players, testing their patience and resolve - but that was part of its magic.
Patch 1.12, Drums Of War, is the build of choice for the majority of private servers running the original World Of Warcraft. It was just an interim patch between the introduction of Naxxramas, the notoriously vicious 40-man final raid, and WOW’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade. The logic goes that it’s vanilla WOW’s final and best incarnation, for in the two years between World Of Warcraft’s release and version 1.12, myriad fixes and quality-of-life improvements had turned a rickety, spit-and-glue MMO into a real cultural phenomenon that was fast approaching ten million subscribers. By this time, you could have more than one action bar on the screen. The Looking For Group…
You May Also Like
Returning to Runescape, over one decade on We’re going back... back to the browser!
The heartbreaking story of how one man spent $16k on Final Fantasy and nearly lost his family Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius' combining of characters that people love with gacha-esque monetization can end up going very badly.
The video games about nothing Seinfeld is famously a show about nothing, but indie developers continue to find plenty of something to work with.
