This is the oddest column ever.  In-game, real-life pizza ordering, Europe out-Warcrafts North America, plus other oddities.  Check that action out.

I could have been a famous singer, if I had someone else's voice.

Since the boards are up, but main site is down, I'll give you some quotes from the column:
"Sony Online Entertainment and Pizza Hut have teamed up to allow players too lazy to use a telephone an in-game method of ordering pizza.  By typing the "/pizza" command, a web browser window linked to Pizza Hut's online ordering service will pop up.  When simultaneously asked "what's next" by millions of people, Lucan simply responded by shoving pizza down the throats of many."
(snip)
"I thought [The Matrix Online beta testing] was terrible"
(Snip)
"Well, Europe has officially smoked [North American first-day World of Warcraft sales], as 280,000 units found their way into the hands of European MMORPGamers."
(Snip)
Gardena, California Internet PC Cafe will see aFinal Fantasy XI fan fest as part of the "iGames Tour 2005."


And then there's other stuff.  The letters are pretty good, too.  Read them when the site's back up.

mmmm Pizza Hut sounds good right about now.

and those were some fine looking mithra

I saw that EQII Pizza thing on SomethingAwful a day or two ago, and my reaction remains the same. Would people actually do that? That's insanely lazy..

And those cosplayers..for some reason, seeing a WHM in full AF just made me crack up. Thumbs up to Thief in the first pic too.

Rage I was sorta commenting that Square finally did something for  the players who complained about being MPked or that they couldn't get spawns due to RMTs.

Also there's another large group of players who complained that fishing was boring.(there are also people who complain about the fishing bots in the people that are actually high-level fishermen)  In this they decided to kill two birds with one stone and finally make fishing more than just pushing 3 buttons.

No one thought they would do a thing even with all the complaints...but they finally did!

(P.S.: Have fun with my old screenshot.  The Sea Horror killed me after I took it!)

Edited by Shadowcat on --

The news on fishing is awesome, at least.  Way back when I first joined FFXI (Dec. of 2003 or so), fishing was my favorite craft.  Since then, though, in (unsuccessful) attempts to stop botters, they've continually nerfed catch rates and slowed down the speed at which the skill increases.  Of course, this didn't stop botters, it only made it near-impossible for legit fishers to make a profit without going insane from boredom.  Hopefully this will make fishing profitable again, maybe even fun.

I also wonder what the new trait they're going to give to WHMs is... sometimes they come up with very useful traits, some others are very lame. :-p

Also, I suppose it's a little off-topic, but here's an absolutely hilarious video I just found today on the subject of beastmasters and MPKs:  http://www.geocities.jp/tylor777/naitou/saposhi/Flash50.html

Edited by Minneyar on --

I gotta say I have no problem with someone botting to avoid doing something as ridiculously boring as FFXI's fishing.  And what SE initially did about it defied logic.  Seriously, who did they think they were hurting?  Changing the craft itself is the way to go, not tinkering with catch rates and stuff.

i wonder if conor oberst plays ffxi? for some reason i think that would be insanely cool.

/random

I see someone else is a bit taken with the new Bright Eyes record.

As for the /pizza command.  It personally doesn't effect me in any way since I wouldn't touch a greasy ass pizza with a 10-foot pole, though I'm surprised at the low number of people I see who are totally disgusted with it.  Sure there's a lot of bitching on the Sony forums that they're programming #### like this instead of fixing the myriad bugs that infest the game, but so far the consensus on this one has been that it's silly.  Others have dismissed the promotion as something that could prevent a rate hike later in the future.  I say at the rate people are leaving EQ2 due to their inability to fix the gameplay and aesthetic faults with the game, a rate hike in the future is inevitable, regardless of how many pizzas Pizza Hut can peddle through this feature.

I guess it's only a matter of time before we start seeing ad billboards in-game (Matrix online with its more plausible modern-day setting would be a hot spot IMO), and that thought really frightens me.

Quite.

I suspect the reason you aren't seeing complaints here Liquid, is directly proportional to the fact most who've posted so far don't play the game, and therefore are only effected in a "Ha, that's pretty silly of them" style.

Dracos
Pizza Pizza

just more comments: the "/pizza" command is just too funny to complain about.  It's a joke to most of us gamers....we'd never use it but we just can't help but laugh at it!  I mean it brings up so many lazy player jokes it's not even funny!  So anytime your buddy plays EQ2 and types in the command you can so make fun of him for not just dilaing the phone!

i've actually only gotten (and become smitten with) digital ash so far, mostly because i wasn't gonna dish cash on 2 albums at once, and because i was thoroughly amused by the guy puking binary code into a toilet that was superimposed over the pretty blue lotus on the album cover. though after hearing a lot of wide awake live, i think i might get it after all.

nah, conor wouldn't be much of a party guy in an mmorpg, but if there was a '/beer' command he might be persuaded to contribute a little more (which i think would be infinitely more popular and profitable than the '/pizza' command if not for the fact that a great deal of players are underage...). he'd be more of a 1-player console rpg player though i think, the recent trend of angsty antiheroes paralyzed by emotional inertia might appeal to him *smirk*... that's it, squeenix's next ff protagonist should be modelled completely after him, warbly crooning and guitar swinging and beer bottle swigging and all. absolutely useless in a fight, but i think he's waify enough to fit the bill.

now *that* was damn tangential, if not completely random.

uhh... yeah... hmm... commerce corrupts art, but this is a commercial society and hence the contamination is inevitable, so everyone just pay their monthly mmorpg subscription fees and relish the taste of pizza grease as voluntary thought and motor control become obsolete.  

/pizza is funny indeed.  But one has to wonder how far we are from /callgirl....  

I am really lazy and I would actually use the /pizza command if it was in FFXI. In fact I ordered pizza yesterday off of pizzahut.com

An MMO story:
Yeah, so I started playing the 'devil game' again a few weeks ago.  Just off and on, and I'd forogotten how amusing early morning pick-up games could be.  There we were: The NA BLM (Me) and DRK (A new friend.  Yay!), along with a European THF, two Chinese (Non-gilseller) mages (RDM and WHM), and a Japanese PLD.

After picking a bad spot, we finally head out to the Valley of sorrows.  Nice place.  Have you been?  Anyway, everyone in the group knows the Japanese player (leader) can't speak English.  She fumbles around with the auto-translator and such and everyone's havign a great time.  Until about two fights in, when she notices the RDM is out of MP.  (Red Mage) (convert), she says.  The red mage says, "Thank you." Japanese PLD: "Are u (Red Mage)?" Red Mage: OK Paladin: "(Red Mage) (Job) (Convert) MP/HP" Red Mage: *casts Refresh and Regen on the PLD*  Repeat for about two and a half hours... >.>  All the while, the THF, DRK, and I are trying to figure out exactly why the RDM refuses to use one of their staple party Job abilities...

It turn out that, while she could speak a tiny bit of English, she really had no idea what we were saying.  Which would explain why she rested by a gob while weakened and got blown up... <.<  It wasn't until the THF gave her a complete macro that she learned how to use the ability.  You'd think we'd have gotten frustrated (the poor PLD did), but it was sorta' just funny seeing those two try to communicate.  Especially since the auto-translator only works for English-Japanese translations.

I did feel kind of bad for the Taru RDM.  Afterall, it wasn't her fault and she did do an excellent job for not knowing what convert was or how to use it.  It gave me a new appreciation for the players' determination.  They both worked so hard to try and overcome the language barrier.  Most people would have just given up or gotten frustrated.  That's usually when the rude comments start flying.

What shocked me most, though, was that the Japanese PLD actually formed the party.  Usually, I would be the only English-speaking person in a group started by a Japanese player, but despite not knowing more than 5 English words, she ventured to create an almost completely non-Japanese group.  It took a lot of guts on her part.  Either that, or she was really desperate to EXP. Either way, it was a fun group.  We didn't get a lot of experience, but that's not the main reason I join pick-up parties, anyway...

A  good story, Rumikoholic.  Thanks for sharing.  I love talking about that kind of stuff  

As for this:

Quote

/pizza is funny indeed.  But one has to wonder how far we are from /callgirl...

Very far, simply because there are not enough callgirls in the world to answer the requests that would come from shut-in MMO addicts around the world