When not pretending to send his children off in UFO-shaped balloons or having his trousers dry-cleaned, Richard Heene likes to write theme songs for his science adventures. This one is getting slated across the internet, but I find it rather catchy. Tune into the show that’s really effective: Watch Richard Heene…. Science Detective!
Unfortunately for Mr Heene, the non-Science Detectives have also proven to be fairly effective. I would suggest to him that the fatal flaw in his plan was expecting 6 year olds to hold up under the brutal interrogation techniques of cable news.
If you want to know what it’s like to be arrested,
be blogged about quite rudely, and widely detested.
With parenting skills that are truly defective:
Ask Richard Heene…Science Detective!
By all accounts Free to Play (F2P) Dungeons and Dragons Online has been a roaring success. In my own investigations I have found multiple packed low level instances filled to the brim with folks asking foolish newbie questions. Counter-intuitively, DDO subscriptions are up 40%, presumably because the F2P model allowed players enough time and content to get a bit hooked, and be sure they liked what they’d be getting. Myself, I am sticking with an F2P account, though I confess I spent some money to buy enough Turbine Points to unlock the Warforged and Monk, and grab a couple of adventure packs. I shall be endeavouring not to spend any further cash, and perhaps the free points you get during gameplay and the free content will be enough to keep me in adventures for now.
To my mind DDO has been brought back from the dead, with a second chance at glory. It had a lacklustre launch with insufficient promotion, never really making the splash it deserved. An awful lot like Everquest 2, in fact. Both games have been hiding in WoW’s shadow for far too long. I can only hope that the influx of money to Turbine will be put to good use feeding an ever-expanding DDO live-team. I’ll give Turbine one hint: If you’ll finally sort out Gnomes, and their Dragonmark, I’d be willing to spend a few points on unlocking that.
There was a time when EQ2 also sold adventure packs. Sundered Splitpaw, Bloodlines, and the Fallen Dynasty (the Isle of Mara) were all sold as online-only mini expansions for the price of $7.99 (if memory serves me right) These days they come as part of your core install, and they were sizable chunks of content worth their asking price. At some point, SOE realised that they could get that much money for a single appearance-only hat, which took a lot less effort. There have been no adventure packs since Legends of Norrath and the Station Cash shop opened.
Recently there has been a great deal of unhappiness with a new development in EQ2’s love affair with RMT (Real Money Transactions). In the next set of Legends of Norrath cards, there will be a loot card which grants one-time access to a special dungeon. Given how difficult it will be for anyone to get that card, it must be pretty awesome in that dungeon.
In DDO when you buy an adventure pack, which grants you access to a set of dungeons forever, you know exactly how much it will cost you. Everquest 2 expects you to gamble, buying packs of cards until you are lucky enough to get the one you want. I do not know the exact odds, but my experiences with getting loot cards from my free packs suggests you would need to buy a great number to stand a good chance of getting the specific loot card which opens the dungeon. This will restrict the number of people who get to experience this dungeon to the extremely lucky, and the obsessively addicted.
It is about time that Everquest 2 ended the charade that most people buy Legends of Norrath to play the card game. They do it for the loot cards, and it is a cynical exploitive way for SOE to make money. They should just remove loot cards from LoN, add them to the shop, and sell them honestly with upfront pricing, rather than forcing its customers to buy lottery tickets in the hopes of getting to experience new content. It should be noted that EQ2 also has a subscription fee. I do not think that having both extreme RMT AND a mandatory subscription charge is sustainable. I’d be happy for the RMT to go away, but I think that is not the way the MMO winds are blowing these days
Given the success of Free Realms, I have a feeling that EQ2 may be making the leap to being Free to Play, supported by RMT, with an optional subscription like Free Realms and DDO have. The streaming technology used by Free Realms has been adapted for use in EQ2 (and was responsible for the dreadful memory issues many people experienced after Live Update 53), and will be enabled at the time of the next expansion to make for a smoother new player experience. We have been promised that there will, at that time, be a great influx of new players, and I doubt that’s going to happen just because they get to start in Halas. My prediction is that Everquest 2 is going F2P. Feel free to poke fun at me if I turn out to be wrong.
Update 29th July, 2010: In the end, EQ2 did go F2P, though not in the way I hoped for. You can read about that here.
Wheee! Still struggling with the character creator, I’ve had another try at Spelling Bee. Mostly working on his body shape, to make him somewhat less hideous to the eye, and fiddling with his haircut, I finally came up with something reasonably decent to be getting on with.
There was something about his face though. It was nagging away at me. Imagine my dismay when about five minutes into the tutorial I suddenly realise:
That my majestic literate bee has ended up looking like a manga Michael Jackson. He’ll be taking a trip to the tailor as soon as practical, for a new head.
I’m gearing up for the Champions Online Early Access on Friday. The Beta server is still open, and so I’m beavering away at trying to convert my old City of Heroes characters.
Spelling Bee in City of Heroes.
Spelling Bee in Champions Online.
I have a little work to do before I fully recapture his beelike majesty. OK, I admit it, he’s hideous. This is not helped by the complete absence of horizontal stripes as a costume pattern option, and the limited colour choices, which are almost all far too glowy. In truth, Champions character creation seems a bit more limited than CoX, which surprised me seeing as it is essentially the same team behind it. Turns out I also prefer the graphical engine of CoX in general, as Champions seems kind of fuzzy and weirdly lit most of the time.
I greatly enjoy City of Heroes, and often pop back for some Bee fun, so I am hoping that Champions will eventually fill a similar gap. Currently though it feels a lot more limited. While it is unfair to compare a fresh game with one that has 5 years to mature, it is still the case that new games should be expected to be better than their ancestors, and I am unconvinced that Champions is. Or possibly I’m just bitter about the horizontal stripes thing. I only spent a little time in the open beta, so it is too early to jump to too many conclusions, but Cryptic’s previous work still provides strong competition. Cryptic must work hard to speedily add all the features that folks have come to expect from a superhero game.
I’ll write more on Champions once I’ve had more of a chance to play it on Live.
We have a centralised health service that is run by the Government
from Whitehall. A health service that is managed and directed by a few
from their ivory towers in Whitehall. A health service that would not be
out of place in Stalin’s Russia.
How on earth has it got as bad as this? We are one of the most
successful countries in the world. We are meant to be a modern 21st
Century country. Yet we have gone from having one of the best health
services in the western world to arguably the worst.
That’s Peter Bone, Conservative MP for Wellingborough, and strident foe of UK embryonic research, claiming that we have the worst health system in the Western World. However, he has a plan to fix it!
The new system would require you to take out health insurance to
cover your family’s medical expenses. This would be set at a level to
cover all your family’s medical expenses greater than 5% of your
family’s income. The insurance must cover all serious medical
conditions which could require significant costs. In addition you could
take out voluntary insurance which could cover other areas and, if you
like, the medical deductible.
Separately you would be required to set up a medical savings account.
This would be a savings plan that commences when you reach the age
of 18 and would provide for all your health insurance premiums in
retirement.
That’s right. He wants us to pay into an insurance scheme. One that only covers certain things, and if we want any more, we have to pay extra. Once you’ve bought this insurance, it would not kick in until you had paid out 5% of your income (what insurance folks call a deductible). This healthcare would be provided by private profit-making healthcare companies. Essentially what he wants is to break the NHS up and create a compulsory version of the US system. According to him, this would magically never have waiting times for treatment AND cost us less.
A look at expense claims suggests Mr Bone could certainly afford this. He employs his own wife as Executive Secretary, paying her £40,000 a year. He also claims £4800 a year in food allowance, the maximum allowable under MP expenses rules. He’s quite trim for someone who eats that much.
While I’m sort of a Liberal Green sort of chap, I accept that there is a relatively sane wing of the Conservative party, the “One Nation Conservatives”. I’m actually quite fond of several of them (particularly Kenneth Clarke). They need to stand up against the radical ideologues of the far-right who have been gaining in numbers and influence within the Tory party for far too long. Ideally before the next time the conservatives have the power to actually go through with any of these crazy ideas.
