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The situation didn’t change that much, the [X]pendapalooza give me a big boost, but also to my direct competitor. @Remtweet is still trailing but I’m confident I can sustain my lead in the week to come. I’m thinking I should do more investing in new arrivals, see if they can boost my net wealth. What I did notice is that I was at a disadvantage because of not buying any luxury items earlier. Well I remedied that for the most part and acquired some items. Hopefully I this will offset my disadvantage!

EA has found a new way to take gamers’ money without actually publishing a great game for it. They launch the Season Ticket, costing a yearly $25, that allows you to play EA Sports games 3 days before launch, after which you’ll have to buy the complete game once again (already they release the sports games on a yearly basis). Additional benefits include a DLC discount and premium web content. In my opinion totally useless, this is just like registering for the EA Sports Fan club without any benefits. Basically, if you’re an EA sports fan your yearly spending just increases with 25, while you are still playing the same game with the same barely changed features that were there last year.

Electronic Arts is one of the biggest and most succesful publishers in the world controlling franchises like Need for Speed, The Sims, Battlefield, Dragon Age and many, many more. But for some reason, with all these great IP’s and developers, they are not able to make as much money as for example Blizzard. That must hurt, so instead of improving their offering they think of a new way to charge you more for the same. Horrible, horrible company.

They should look at Notch of Minecraft fame. He understand what it’s about and gets rewarded with an enormous and loyal following that actually likes to pay him!

According to MMO-Champion’s post Blizzard has just registered a new name to be used in the online gaming sphere. This name is Mists of Pandaria and is supposedly the upcoming expansion of the world’s most succesful MMO World of Warcraft. The reason it is believed its for WoW and not for their project that’s codenamed Titan is because the Panda’s already play a part in the Warcraft world. This youtube vid is proof:

In the forums, speculation is already underway, general opinion is that this expansion will see the addition of two new playable races and will expand the level cap to 90. I’m curious to see how long Blizzard can keep its users entertained. And I’m very curious to see what project Titan is. Any ideas?

I’ve written about gold farming in the past as a problem that’s plaguing many MMO games like World of Warcraft and the Diablo games in the past. Automated (or very single-minded) players would  only be in the game for the sake of earning gold to sell it to other players willing to pay a premium. The problem has always been the illegal nature of it all and the shabby sort of people able to make this work on a steady basis (gold farming sweat shops).

Blizzard, in my opinion the most successful publisher in the world, has now decided to incorporate gold trading in their upcoming Diablo 3 game. Allowing people to offer items on an in game real-money auction house. Listing items here will require a small fee (to guard the quality of the items on offer) and a cash out will require a small fee to be paid to Blizzard.

I think this allows for a more ‘clean’ playing field and will get the shady groups and companies away from gamers.

An extensive article can be found on Gaming Radar about this subject.

After this post I will stop talking about Empire Avenue for at least a week! But the past 24 hours (actually 22,5 hours) have been pretty fantastic. I spent 448,206.39 EAves on a big number of people and a lot of great people bought me. Like at the second [X]Pendapalooza people I’d bought rarely bought back for a solid amount of shares and I expect all of them to sell my shares again soon enough.

Well I couldn’t really care, look at my price graph:”

Like any week, I post an update on my performance in this great little game called Empire Avenue. There is two sides to the game, of which this list only sheds light on one; generating EAves by investing in others.

This week I surpassed REMPIRE, finally, but two more players steamed by. And what’s even worse, they joined later than me. Obviously they did something better

In this case; they sold a lot more of their shares. Which gives them commission and allows for the purchase of more shares. I had to work quite a bit longer to get to a 3 mln net worth. Anyway, the top 3 is still a given, but up untill the 4th spot it’s anybody’s game. Wish me luck!

Oh, and what I forget to add is that today is [X]Pendapalooza again; in which the xbar community will spend huge amounts of eaves on eachother. I will be participating and will only be investing in newer players, preferably with a NW < 500k and a price of up to 40 or something. But we’ll see how that works out. Last time my net wealth jumped considerably so I hope to do the same thing now.

Past week I was enjoying myself in forgotten France, so you can imagine I haven’t been spending too much time on Empire Avenue. Turns out my direct competitors have, but the investments I’ve made in the past few weeks are still paying off  and my wealth kept rising. There’s a new competitor as well, but I’m still aiming for the number 6 position, which is almost within reach, I hope to get there next week!