Dungeon Finder Woes in WoW

After deciding to finally level a character to 80 in World of Warcraft (I’ve had an account that I’ve played off and on for a few years) I’ve been experiencing the pain of running Wrath of the Lich King instances using the dungeon finder.

As great as the instances themselves are, the whole experience is ruined by the fact that players who have progressed beyond this content are compelled… Continue reading

Anyone for MUD Reviews?

I haven’t blogged anything for a while so I thought it would be fun to play some new MUDs and post reviews of them here. So if anyone wants me to review their MUD please let me know!

I run a MUD of my own so obviously I can’t claim to be completely free from bias, but I will try to make the reviews as fair and impartial as… Continue reading

FMud update released

A few minor fixes in this release.

Download it here.

Version 0.92

Released on 2nd March 2010.

  • Fixed a bug with the hide_password parameter
  • Fixed a bug with font selection
  • Fixed a bug with handling telnet ECHO

FMud is a simple web based Flash mud client. A running demo, feature list and installation instructions are available on the FMud project page

Allods Online Cash Shop Woes

I played a little Allods Online during the closed beta and was impressed with what I saw. It felt polished for a free to play game, and there was just the right balance of WoW clone and original features to give it a broad appeal. This week the cash shop opened, and boy are the Allods players not impressed.

While this poll question might as well have been… Continue reading

Integrating Kongregate Authentication

We recently launched Maiden Desmodus on Kongregate and part of converting the client for their site involved integrating their user authentication with our own account system. This was a fairly simple process, but I’ll outline the steps I took here in case it proves useful to anyone else.

When users connect to Maiden Desmodus for the first time, either using our web client or via telnet they are first… Continue reading

SmartFoxServer, Photon and Project Darkstar

We’ve started on the design for the next game and as it’s going to use a completely custom client I’ve been looking around at more general socket servers for the backend. I had toyed with the idea of using our existing engine built on top of Nakedmud, but came to the conclusion that we need something more robust and scalable for this new game. So for the last couple of… Continue reading

Maiden Desmodus Web Client Video

I’ve made another one of my fun Flash client videos, this time it’s a brief tour of the interface for the Maiden Desmodus web client

Maiden Desmodus Out of Beta

We’ve decided to officially open Maiden Desmodus this month after 6 months of being in open beta. It’s not much of a difference given that we’ve been open to players since June and we’re not having any kind of player wipe but we are having a special event to celebrate on Friday 8th January at 4pm PST / 7pm EST. Unfortunately this means it will be at midnight for me… Continue reading

Earth Eternal

Earth Eternal is a new browser based MMO from Sparkplay Media, a company formed by Matt Mihaly and Chris Kohnert of Iron Realms Entertainment. I’ve been keeping an eye on the development because of the MUD connection and recently got around to trying it out. This isn’t going to be a review of the game, instead I just want to talk about how I think the design… Continue reading

Derren Brown: The Events

I love Derren Brown, I really do. I find his brand of modern mentalism, where psychology and NLP have replaced psychic powers and ESP, hugely entertaining. Tonight’s show was the first in his new series, The Events, and it was utter bullshit.

On Wednesday he did a 10 minute live show where he appeared to predict the national lottery result with the promise of an hour long show tonight to explain… Continue reading