Farmville may be the biggest Facebook game to date. And Zynga’s laughing all the way to the bank.

But do you know that you can run a REAL farm online? You heard me right. Britain’s National Trust has established MyFarm, in which “A real estate in Cambridgeshire, England has been set aside to be “run” by 10,000 “farmers”, who each month will determine via voting what gets built, which crops are sown, basically anything and everything to do with running a real, functional farm.”

See the video after the break

MyFarm. Farmville for Real

Don’t forget to share!

Again, here’s the MyFarm Official Website

2010 was an awesome year. There’s much growth on my blog’s readership and the Facebook page has never been better.

In work, we launched a couple of games this year, I went to Indonesia for RWC, and of course, had another uber-successful LU LIVE 2010.

For my hobbies, I certainly couldn’t wish anything else. Had great mods and projects for the model kits and also made great progress (and improvements, I hope) in Photography.  Let me share with you the top posts and my favorite posts of 2010.

Thanks to you, all my dear readers, without you, this success and the awesome year that was 2010 would not have been possible.

GM Tristan’s Best Posts of 2010

First let’s start with the stats (from Google Analytics). So, without further ado, here are my Top 10 posts based on the number of views/visits. Each of the posts below have 20,000 or more views at least. Thanks to all you, my readers;

1. How To Download and Save Youtube Videos
2. How To Generate a cool name for your MMO character
3. Maria Ozawa: Pics, Profile and More
4. Plants vs. Zombies Enless Strategy
5. How To Start Your Own Internet Cafe Business
6. kRO Announces Ragnarok Online 3rd Job Classes
7. Ragnarok Renewal 3rd Jobs
8. Register Now for KOS Philippines
9. Girls
10. Grand Chase Philippines

Now, here are my own personal favorite posts of last year. Another Top 10 list

1. Elly Tran – for me, Elly Tran is, hands down, the babe of 2010. You should check it out. You won’t be disappointed.
2. Gundam Tieren Diorama – My favorite diorama and mod-build for 2010. It’s my first dio too. Am glad it turned out great.
3. The Power of Social Networks – my notes on how to use SNS for personal or business goals.
4. Toy Photography Setup – 2010 was also the year I started to be more active in Toy Photography. Here’s my simple article on how to get started for beginners.
5. Toy Photography Facebook Contest – So, yes, I started a highly successful Toy Photo contest last May. Got hundreds and hundreds of entries. Was so happy with the results. Thanks to all those who joined.
6. 10 Ways Video Games Can Boost Your Professional Career – Title says it all. ‘Nuff said.
7. The Man Who Saved The World – In September, my birthday month, I found out that the day would have ended on the same date as my birthday. Interesting story.
8. RWC 2010 Jakarta – I visit Indonesia with Team Philippines for RWC 2010. We take 3rd place.
9. Allods CBT – in October11 we launched our newest MMORPG, Allods!
10. Level Up LIVE 2010 – The best gaming event just got better. Nov 6 & 7, WTC

Again, my heartfelt thanks to all readers and fans.

Here’s glasses raised to a more awesome 2011.

Peace!

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The new year is upon us. And, like last year, I’m off to make another list of New Year’s resolutions… most of which will be just for moot.

I’m sure me, like many others, will be making their own resolution lists. But what if we put a cool spin on it? And treat New Year’s Resolutions like a game? There are many instances where we can compare it to video games… let’s see what those points are, shall we?

1. Bad Habits – Just like in gaming, there are bad habits that you can do without. For example, in a fighting game, I am often used to my combo “patterns”. This will work good vs an AI but will definitely fail against real people. So, just like bad habits in real life, you have to “unlearn” them to make your game better.
2. Nice endings – playing a video game in normal or easy mode will make you see the “normal ending”. Why not pattern your new year resolutions like this? I mean, you can improve upon either work, school or personal life to accomplish bigger and better goals… this will be your “Nice Endings”. Digs?
3. Achievements - For me, what gives games the ultimate replay value are the achievements. The perfect example of this would be Star Craft 2. I play the campaign again and again to test my skills and see if I can unlock the many achievements in the game. Just like in real life, you can prepare your own personal list to “unlock” these achievements. Best of luck to you.
4. Helping Others – Great video games call upon teamwork and social skills to succeed. This, of course, mirrors the real world. Wouldn’t it be cool to make it your 2011 goal to help others? Be it your little brother or sister (helping him/her in homework or school projects), your parents, your co-workers or classmates; you’ll never run out of reasons to help others. The world will be a better place if we all do.
5. Villains – Every great game has a great villain. To name a few, Sephiroth, Darth Vader, Kane, Bison, King Koopa, etc. We all loathe them and want to best them with our skills (and cooperation, see #4). You can personify villains in real life too. They may not be real persons but rather they can be like laziness, being late, not being true to your word, etc. Identify your own villains and add them to your list. Your goal is to strike them down in 2011.

There you have it. Your own list of resolutions compared to gaming. If you put this mindset, perhaps seeing through your new 2011 resolution lists will be much more easier (and fun). Feel free to share this article with your fellow gaming friends, ayt?

I wish you all the best in 2011 and may you go through your own lists in record time.

Strength and Honor!

Happy New Year to everyone. Wishing an awesome 2011 in gaming and in real life!

Addiction to anything is bad. Even games.

It’s a disease. A lot of people think they’re not addicted until it’s too late. Then they have problems with family, work or school. I’ll be the first dude to say that even TOO MUCH playing is a bad thing. Yes, even if I work in the gaming industry. We all have to prioritize the important things too… work, school and family, among other things.

According to this study on netaddictions.com, here are the symptoms to know if you’re already addicted to MMORPGs.

How to Know if you’re Addicted to MMORPGs

• A preoccupation with gaming
• Lying or hiding gaming use
• Disobedience at time limits
• Loss of interest in other activities
• Social withdrawal from family and friends
• Psychological withdrawal from the game
• Using gaming as an escape
• Continuing to game despite its consequences

Why Do People Become Addicted?

Here are some reasons why…

• You can be a different ‘YOU’ - often people with low esteem, overweight, or those who think they’re ugly, can have a totally different avatar in online games. Hence, they think they have to be online most of time. Often, they tend to think that their online avatar is the “new reality” and hurt their real selves in the process.
• Social Need – Those that have few “real” friends tend to have more inside the game. Again, this blurs the reality between real and virtual for these types of players.
• The Need for Greed – People simply are NOT satisfied. There’s that “one more level” a better armor set or any other goals that are fueled by greed. This often results to cheating, stealing or even scamming other people just to fulfill these goals.
• I can’t lose – MMORPGs are often designed as “never-ending”. There are no win or lose definitions. And by the nature of this design, some people will have their own goals of “winning”. This will sometimes mean being-better-than-everyone else, either in the server or in the game. Most Pinoys will employ pilots so that they can be online 24/7

Treatments

The first step, like any addiction such as alcohol or tobacco, is to ADMIT that you are addicted. More often than not, you can’t do it alone. You need the help of either a professional or the support of family, friends or your partner.

There are also some resources online to help you. Online Gamers Anonymous has a 12-step way to cure the addiction. While other tips can be found at netaddictions.com

So, there you go.

I hope that you guys stay cool and don’t be addicted, k?

Thanks!

GM T

Sharing with you a good article by business site Forbes.com

The story tells a tale about two top executives who started out as gamers. Among them is Elliot Noss, chief executive of domain name provider Tucows, and 20-something Stephen Gillett, a gamer who became chief information officer of Starbucks. Both have applied leadership principles acquired through their own video game experiences.

“We’re finding that the younger people coming into the teams who have had experience playing online games are the highest-level performers because they are constantly motivated to seek out the next challenge and grab on to performance metrics,” says John Hagel III, co-chairman of a tech-oriented strategy center for Deloitte. Hagel has been studying the effect that playing videogames has on the performance of young professionals in the workplace.

Furthermore, here’s a summary of the top 10 ways games can help boost your career;

1. Leadership – Without a leader, raids or group quests cannot succeed
2. At First You Don’t Succeed – Try again. Go back to the last save point
3. It’s About Teamwork – There’s no “I” in team
4. Developing Talent – discover new skills, train newbies
5. Learning to Improvise – Faced with a new situation, learn to discover another way around it
6. Performance Driven – Awards and recognition let gamers see where they stand vs. others
7. Living For Challenges – Gamers are performance driven. Professionals who are also gamers seek this unconsciously
8. Competition – scores and rankings keep you on your toes
9. Becoming an Entrepreneur – business, buy and sell and ways to make money for your character translates to good economic sense in the real world.
10. Managing Information – Games are not easy. You have to do your homework and always seek out to improve on knowledge

For more information and details about the top 10 list, you can find it here.

Be sure to share this with your Facebook friends by clicking the SHARE BUTTON below. Thanks

It’s over!

We have a new Philippine Champion! Team Shivans defeats their sister team, Naked for the honor to represent the Philippines in this year’s RWC. They will fly to Jakarta, Indonesia and compete.

Last year, we finished 1st runner up vs. Japan. Who knows what will happen to us this year? Is it time to become champions? With 4 girls in the team, I hope “girl power” will be FTW!

More photos after the break…

RWC 2010 Philippine Finals. July 17, 2010. A.Venue, Makati

One of the highlights of the tournament was an actual battle between Plants vs. Zombies. I also announced the coming of Ragnarok Renewal patch (3rd Jobs) for the Philippines which will surely be in the commercial servers before LIVE 2010. That’s another exciting news for all RO players! We’ll upload the new trailer vid to our official youtube channel ASAP.

For more photos, click here to see it at my Facebook Fan Page. Don’t forget to “Like” it too.

Again, congrats to Team Shivans and thanks to all the RO players who attended the event. It would not have been a success without your support.

Rok On!

It used to be simpler 8 to 10 odd years or so ago, the online gaming market wasn’t as cramped, cutthroat and saturated like what it is today. In today’s unforgiving industry, a LOT of games get designed, put on the proverbial closed beta axe and (around 80% to 90%) will never get to see the light of day. This may be due to the fact that most games are just rehashes or old gimmicks or, sadly, clones of more popular AAA titles. There toooo much fantasy titles out there. The teams that tried to stay away from them are also having a hard time.

Only the innovative designs strike a big chance of seeing their titles go past the betas and earn money in the “commercial” stage. A like-the-rest-of-em game may be a modest hit but if another similar title comes up with better graphics, it’s difficult to start all over again and retain players.

Here’s my unsolicited advice for the design/developer talents out there… some ideas off the top of my head on how to make things work…

Online Game Design Notes For The Future

• 1. Make It Easy For Users To Recruit their friends – There’s nothing wrong with a kick-ass marketing plan or a deep marketing pockets. I’d take that any day of the week. But the most overlooked (and sometimes biggest) acquisition tool would be the users themselves. An online game is a social activity. That’s the key to its success. In the future, I’d want to see games that make it easy for players to invite their friends with a single mouse click. I’m seeing it now in Social Games especially by Zynga and other Facebook games. If the designers can integrate this into their designs, publishing and making profit on a game will be simpler.

• 2. The Itch For Chance – Games of chance such as lotteries are a big hit. In the future, games should offer daily lotteries which can be bought by either in-game cash or item mall currency. Players like games of chance. Who doesn’t want to be a millionaire for just pennies invested? One of the hurdles of the gaming industry is to keep within the boundaries of the laws on the areas/countries where they operate. Sometimes a simple lottery may be legal in an area but it may be a crime in some.
• 3. Rewards and Recognition – a simple way to rank players’ achievements. This can be as simple as what Sony’s PSN is doing… putting your trophies online and announcing it to your Facebook friends – automatically! If you unlock an achievement and it isn’t shared, it’s pretty much useless, dontcha think? Design teams should integrate it into their games as a standard. The game should seamlessly connect with online platforms like websites or social media to give more value to these rankings, rewards and recognition. Players always love it when they’re on the top of the pack (and have bragging rights to prove it)!

• 4. Social Media is your friend – With Facebook’s Connect app and widgets, companies (and games too) should see the true value of this. It’s become sort of like a UNIVERSAL LOG IN worldwide. Got facebook? Then, why register? Games of the future should allow new players to instantly connect and play in no time using their Facebook account. It’s happening now and I predict that this will be the wave of the future.
• 5. Business Model Before Eye Candy - Most of the games I tried were obviously designed with the graphics, gameplay and what-have-you BEFORE the business model was ever integrated. More often than not, the item mall was designed as an afterthought. Designers should see the fallacies of this “mode of thinking”. Hey! All online games should be treated as businesses and the business model should be among the TOP CONSIDERATIONS for game design. A paradigm shift among the top dev companies will do wonders for the industry.

There are other great and new ideas out there. Developers who harness the power of feedback from the users will lead the fray. Doing research and looking at trends will also be “musts” in this industry.

The idle will be left behind.

Cheers!

GM Tristan

Scammers are getting wiser. Since we started Ragnarok in the Philippines way back in 2003, scammers also started their fiendish “art”. The most common method was impersonating a GM and asking for your username and password. Sadly, a lot of people fall for these tricks.

Now, they use more complicated methods; replicating a game’s customer support page, top up page or even log-in page. They also use YM spams and e-mail. A couple of days ago, I received this message in my personal mail.

It came from a certain Ragnarok Online Philippines with an email address of ragnarok.staffs@gmail.com (sic. wrong grammar pa lolz). It asked me to give all my account details (including password) so that my account won’t be deleted.

An obvious scam!

Let this be a warning to all, here are some of the age-old things that we GMs have been preaching to players since day 1 of operations

• GMs will NEVER, NEVER, EVER ask for your password. We don’t need it, period.
• We do not have email accounts in free email services like yahoo, gmail or others. The official domain is levelupgames.ph so always check that
• Don’t share your account details or passwords with anyone. Not even your guildmaster or close friends.
• If you are offered a prize, think twice
• If it’s too good to be true, it probably ain’t.

So, feel free to forward this post to all your fellow players. Remember, be careful always and don’t fall prey to these damn scammers!

Your account is your responsibility. Just a friendly public service from me and all my fellow LU GMs, ayt?

GM Tristan (http://gmtristan.com)

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Traditionally, the Early Bird “pila” outside WTC is a festive gathering of gamers, guildmates and friends. This year, it’s the first time ever that some gamers (from RF Online) were there as early as Thursday!

I went out on Friday night (Nov 6) to check on the gamers at the line… enjoy the vid.

Apologies if I wasn’t able to blog or post pics or updates since I was so busy at the event. When I arrived at the hotel, I was so tired, I couldn’t even press my laptop’s power button.

At any rate, I’ll be catching up on blogging and will bring you coverage posts, photos, videos and other cool gimmicks on what transpired during LIVE 2009 – The Woodstock of Philippine gaming.

United We Play.

If an MMO were a human being, it would need nourishment in order to survive.

Sadly, a lot of MMOs die without even seeing their commercial launch. This prompted me to write this short article on what “vitamins” a game really needs in order to survive this cut-throat industry were hundreds of games compete for success.

Let’s examine the vitamins, one by one, shall we?

MMORPG Vitamins

Vitamin C – which will stand for Content. If innovation is the soul of the game, then content is the one that gives it life, the life-blood. Without REGULAR and APPEALING content, a game is destined to fail… to die. Period. Developers who take too long to know this will see all the fruits of their labor come crashing down like a stack of cards. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. I’ve personally seen this thing over and over again… and it ain’t pretty.

Vitamin A – Appeal. A game should appeal to the majority of users. An old MMO wolf-in-sheeps-clothing won’t simply cut it. There are TOO MANY cookie-cutter games out there. A word to game designers – spare yourselves the agony of failure and be creative.

Vitamin B – Balance. A game should be balanced. This is TOUGH COOKIE to crack. It should neither be too hard, nor too difficult. The grind or leveling pace should neither be too slow or too fast. There are a myriad other ways where balance will be attained. Lastly, publishers and developers should strike a balance between siding for game balance and for revenue. Easier said than done, my friends.

Vitamin E – End Level. This is simple logic. Why would anyone spend hundreds of hours (and dollars or PHP) for a game to get to the top when there’s NOTHING FOR THE PLAYER TO DO ONCE HE (or she) GETS THERE? Designers are focused more on the journey rather than the destination. Take it from the number 1 game in the world (yeah, you know the name)…. “Life begins at 80″. No explanation needed.

Vitamin D – Defy standards. Take a risk, design something new. Be innovative in marketing. Don’t be like the rest. Admittedly, it’s a big gamble. But that’s a lot of people laughed at guys like Da Vinci, Einstein or even Newton before they proved that they were right (and became legends in their own fields).

It’s a tough world out there… sometimes the battlefield is not fair. Delays will cause companies a LOT of money. Miscommunication will cause a lot more.

It’s the teams who take these vitamins that will definitely rise to the top.

Peace!

Mon Macutay (GM Tristan), Aug 2009. http://gmtristan.com

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