The makers of Guild Wars learn from their mistakes. In the first chapter, 70% of the content was for pre level 20 players. In Factions, the pre-level 20 was on a seperate island, and they designed the level up to happen fast, so that you can reach the 80% of the content designed for level 20s.

The problem with factions was the “factions” part, which split established guilds apart as some wanted to be in a Kurzick guild and some in a Luxon. No one plays the big PVP battles (Jade Quarry and Fort Aspenwood) and the most dreaded co-ops are the two dual group co-ops (Vizunah Square and Unwaking Waters)

Nightfall is the first expansion designed for us PvE’ers who solo 90% of the time. The big addition is “Heros” that are basically really smart henchies. You can give them the powers they use and they follow commands on where to go and who to fight.

I only played a few hours and only got one hero to play with, but you can get one from every profession eventually (but you can only use three at a time). I have no idea what the big story is, and the preview weekend only covered the new character island, but I saw enough to know this expansion (coming in late October) is going to be my favorite.

Virtual Society guildwars, reviews

The first realistic water in 3D was in the whale scene in Finding Nemo. Pixar went a step further with water effects in The Incredibles.

But this stuff looks even more amazing!

Metaverse News 3D art, rendering, video

With all the mess associated with the security breach, people are forgetting all about the big event going on: Burning Life 2006

Some of the best scripters and prim artists get together on 4 adjoining sims to build some incredibly cool stuff that only exists for a week or so.

A 360 degree holodeck is easily missed. Its in a giant cube that says “Right Click and Get In” and allows you to view dozens of different images.

One popular theme in the builds is the equivalent of political cartoons. They range from the War in Iraq, to problems with server lag.

Some of the sculptures are rather large and complicated with thousands of prims.

Here’s the funniest one I found. Those houses are scale, so you can imagine how big the guy is.

If you have Second Life, go check it out. Just search for the “burning life” servers.

Virtual Society burninglife, event, secondlife

Not good, not good at all.

Here is the official announcement:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/09/08/urgent-security-announcement/

Supposedly they shut it down as soon as it was discovered, but what kind of damage could be done if say some rich account (i.e. Ansche Chung) was compromised. Bad news!

Even worse were the people that did something stupid when they created their account:

The main problem is people can’t remember the answers they put down for the security question… ie “what is your dog’s name?” Most people just put gibberish, and thus can’t access the accounts.
I think that’s a far better thing than have some asshole log in with your account and delete your intellectual property, your money, and your posessions, and possibly private information.

There may be quite a few less people playing the game after this. Not only those that forgot their security word, but also those that signed up with fake e-mails.

Metaverse News secondlife