It has a very simple premise. Simply ask someone, a friend, family member, work colleague, or even a total stranger the question, “Are you okay?”
It is aimed at preventing suicide by helping people connect. All too often people struggle with issues that seem insurmountable, and feel absolutely alone while doing it. A simple act of care or concern can help share some of that burden. And who knows, maybe someone will keep on living.
Every year in Australia, 2100 people end their own lives, and more than 30 times that (over 63000) attempt suicide. Many, many times that suffer from depression. If someone can be helped by asking three simple words, is that too hard?
Oh, and if someone is honest with you and tells you what they are feeling, consider taking it to the next level and find a way to help.
Now while this is an Australian initiative, I want to encourage my friends from other countries to help someone else by asking the question RUOK? today.
Five years ago today, I posted this, the first post on this blog. It was just a simple little welcome message, written simply because I wasn’t sure what to write on my first blog.
The first few posts were like that too. Wondering what I should be writing, and then struggling to get the words out. A single post at the time would easily take 90 minutes to write. I certainly wasn’t what one would call a wordsmith.
Five years later I’m still not what I would call a wordsmith, but my writing has evolved along with me, and I find it far easier to get the words out now; most posts take less than half an hour. Hopefully my readers have noticed some improvement too.
I started Stropp’s World talking about World of Warcraft, and that was going to be the primary topic of this blog. It was after all part of the play on words that I intended with the title, but over time Stropp’s World has covered a lot of the games that I play, and a lot of commentary on other aspects of the gaming world as well, with the occassional rant over censorship and harsh DRM.
Starting my own business has put a bit of dent in my posting, as well as game play schedule, but I do still find the time for some gaming occassionally. And I still keep a track of the gaming news, especially some of the up and coming games like The Secret World.
While posting here is less frequent, I still intend to keep the blog going. After all I’m still a gamer, and more than anything else, I enjoy blogging about the games I play. Who knows, in five years I might be celebrating the 10th birthday of Stropp’s World.
Star Trek Online is the latest MMO to announce that they are going to go from a subscription model to a free to play business model. Considering that Champions had already made the transition some time ago, this announcement didn’t come as a surprise.
It seems that more and more second tier MMORPGs are making the move to free to play. Dungeons and Dragons Online started the trend a few years ago, and that move saved the struggling game at the time. Since then, we’ve seen Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Champions go free, with Fallen Earth and now Star Trek making the move in the near future.
In the cases of DnDO, LotRO, and AoC the developers have reported significant increases in the number of players playing, and an increase in revenue.
Of course none of the first tier MMORPGs are planning to go FTP anytime soon. WoW and Rift, as far as I know have no intention, and the big up and comers, The Secret World and Star Wars The Old Republic have announced that they will be using the subscription model.
So it seems that, in Western markets at least, developers prefer the subscription business model. And who can blame them? Subs provide a fairly stable income stream, which if you have lots of subscribers can be huge.
But when these games start struggling with subscriber numbers, it seems more and more of them opt to change the model to the free to play model.
So I ask, is this a sign of defeat or does it mean that free to play is the superior business model?
I was feeling like trying something a little different, and since Black Prophecy was Free To Play, I decided to give that a go.
After looking around the website for a registration link, I lodged a support ticket. The response came back pretty quickly:
Hello,
unfortunately an IP Block has been added to our games due to license rights limitations. This means that our servers will only accept players from within the European Union and North America.
So the game isn’t available to Australian players who have traditionally been included in the North America region because of licence restrictions. Is Oz even in line for licencing this game? In a so called global economy, how messed up is that?
or at least if you have a Sandbox MMORPG on the market, boost your advertising.
The fuss caused by the Eve item shop isn’t anything new in the world of MMO games. Players threaten to rage-quit over the silliest of issues, and as far as the numbers show, rarely carry out that threat.
Occasionally though, players do quit en-masse. I suspect the Real ID fiasco Blizzard set in motion a while back was one of these times. Lot’s of players said they quit and indicated Real ID as the reason, and within a fairly short time, the normally unmovable Blizzard backpedaled. It’s hard to tell, though, if this was the cause because the company is in control of the stats and generally only release them when they look favorable. I doubt CCP would do any different.
Still in the case of the Eve shop debacle, there are signs that players are jumping ship.
Remember Perpetuum? I had a quick look at this game when it was released late last year, the folks there emailed me an early access key and I spent a couple of hours tooling around in my robot. My impression was that it was effectively Eve Online but groundside.
Well, it seems that the similarity to Eve is giving it a boost.
According to Massively, Perpetuum is experiencing an influx of Eve players to such an extent that the Perpetuum devs have had to put a login limit in place. That’s right. Perpetuum, a six month old game we haven’t heard that much of since release is now experiencing the (equivalent of) server queues. Even if Eve players aren’t quitting yet, they are trying out the competition.
This might be a good time for developers of other sandboxes to either announce or release their games.
The link, to GamePolitics, tells the story of a Russian game developer being threatened by UK retail stores if the developer integrates their game with Steam. Apparently these brick and mortar stores don’t like digital distribution and (will) refuse to stock games that integrate with Steam. Now say what you like, or don’t like, about Steam (I certainly have, even recently) but this means of distribution is the future for buying games. With increasingly improved broadband, consumer friendly distribution methods like digital and online ordering are here to stay, and indeed grow.
Refusing to stock a game because it can also be bought online is stupid and a great way to make yourself irrelevant to your market. Here’s why.
Gamers tend to buy games that they have heard about. I go to game stores with a particular purchase in mind, usually. Sometimes I’m passing the time and drop in to browse, but more often than not I’m on a mission. If a retailer refuses to stock a game that can also be bought online, they aren’t stopping gamers buying it. They are forcing them to buy online, even if they want a boxed copy, that is the gamer will buy from Amazon.
Eventually, if a gamer can never find the games they want in a particular retail chain store, they will stop going to that store to buy any games. It’s as simple as that. Congratulation UK game retailer, instead of trying to find a way to take advantage of the Internet, you’ve made yourself irrelevant to your target market.
Interestingly the Russion game dev mentioned in the link above said that they’ll continue to list on Steam because it creates better opportunities for sales. In other words, the benefit from selling on Steam outweighs the benefit from being on the soon to be dusty shelves of a few UK game retailers.
For the moment, this blog is a schadenfreude free zone.
Schadenfreude, if you don’t know, is a German word that describes the pleasure one gets when someone else suffers misfortune. It sounds terrible that anyone should enjoy the suffering of others, right? But we all do it some extent, it’s just a part of human nature. (The Germans are very good at word construction when it deals with that.)
Bloggers, and to a much larger extent MMORPG Bloggers, are very prone to bouts of schadenfreude. I read a lot of posts that simply wish ill on others.
Most of these tend to be how the blogger wishes that World of Warcraft would cease to exist, putting many out of work and disappointing the extremely large playerbase that actually enjoys the game. Of course they don’t actually say they’d like to see game developers and ancillary staff on the unemployment lines (in the worst economic times for many years.) They don’t say they want to ruin others entertainment. There is always an undertone of, “Hey this is for the greater good.”
It’s also bizzare that there is often an undertone of a desire for failure of upcoming games.
How many posts have you read that talk about how Star Wars: The Old Republic will be a failure? These posts give a real sense that the writer would love nothing better for the game to fail so they can utter the eternal refrain of the armchair critic, “I told you so!”
I’ll admit to this a little myself. I have on occasion written a piece where I am happy with the concept of someone else’s failure.
But that’s not what motivates me. I would be very happy to see every game succeed.
I might not play SWTOR when it is released (who am I kidding?) but I want it to succeed. I don’t play World of Warcraft anymore, and despite a certain amount of Cataclysm envy I don’t have the urge to return. I still want WoW to succeed, apart from dumb ideas like Real ID, even if the direction is not for me.
The thing is, the more that successful titles are released, the more likely that investors will put money into games that don’t fit the WoW mold. The bigger the market, the better chance that there will be more support for niche games.
It’s in all our interests, game devs and players, that the industry as a whole is more successful.
I just received an email from Ben who has recently started a gaming blog called TooDamnEpic (is that one word?)
So far I’m liking what I’m seeing. The site is nicely set out, and the writing is interesting and has good style. (It reads a lot better than mine did when I started out.)
Head on over and check it out. If you like, add to your reader.
I’m still playing Rift, and enjoying it. My Pyro/Elem Mage, Vroomfondel, is slowly running through the content having just entered the Moonshade Highlands.
The reason my progress has been so slow is that I’m spending a lot of time working on my business these days, and actually feel a little guilty when I put aside any time for gaming. So I tend to limit gaming to the weekend.
Rift tends to lend itself to solo play, even with other players around. I often find myself in a situation where I’ve grouped up and once the goal has been completed, I leave the group and head on to the next challenge. The rift and invasion systems invite this kind of play.
Consquently, I’ve found myself outleveling some of the content, and going back later to complete some quests and acheivements. Unfortunately, by the time I do that, the quests and mobs are often gray and provide no experience or challenge.
It occurred to me last weekend when I was in Freemarch, that I’d love to see the mentoring system that Everquest 2 so cleverly implemented.
EQ2 allows players to match a lower level player’s level. This allows the high level player to adventure with lower level players in a group without simply overwhelming the other players.
Players can also visit a Chronomage and pay some gold to drop their levels for a while to some desired level. The game then scales the players gear and skills down to the appropriate level. Taking into account AA’s and other factors, the character is still pretty powerful, but not massively overpowered.
This is great for exactly the situation I am in with Rift, it allows the player to experience the area as intended, and in the case of Rift some of the daily quests actually require a kill that gives experience. This feature would allow players to go back and build up their reputation after they’ve already grown out of a zone.
