The Secret World has Launched Successfully

Posted by on Jun 30, 2012 in Blog, The Secret World | 2 comments

Dragon TSWSince yesterday noon EST “The Secret World” is life with its Early Access program. Things look very stable with a few kinks in the system still. But those don’t diminish an overall successful launch. It’s something Funcom needed, to improve their track record. No small feat considering the state of the game just one week before. The developers have been very busy last week, patching the game sometimes twice a day on the closed beta servers. It’s been fun watching the developers doing their job and be successful at it.

Another great thing about the game is the noise on the web forum: There is none. Not much whining or cursing at Funcom. No comparsions to WOW. The only people complaining about downtime or missing access were two players who had a power outage in their home and were offline for 6+ hours. Okay, there was one rage quitter. But that was a fun thread from 2010 who got bumped just in time for its entertainment value. Looks like this is going to be a great community.

I’ve been working on my Dragon “Shamble” in the Grim dimension since noon yesterday. There is only a single server worldwide, divided into a couple of “dimensions” to separate play style and languages. There are dedicated dimensions for French and German and one dimension is dedicated to role play. Players have assigned other dimensions as PVP, EU, AUS/NZ and casual, but I don’t expect this division to stand for to long. Players can group and form cabals (guilds) across dimensions anyway. The only place where the dimension matters is the PVP score boards and the resulting buffs for the winning factions.

I am looking forward to playing this game for a long time. I love the puzzles, the skill system is very interesting and the writing and the overall atmosphere is just fantastic. Expect to hear more about it in this spot.


© Disclaimer: The Secret World
"The Secret World" is a registered trademark of Funcom GmbH. All logos, images and names are intellectual properties of Funcom GmBH unless otherwise noted. This site is not endorsed by or affiliated with Funcom GmbH.


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Zombie Survival Tip: Car Alarm

Posted by on Jun 28, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

This weeks zombie survival tip is brought to you by the The Secret WorldDon't jump on cars

Don’t jump on cars. It’s a simple rule. Don’t lean on them. Don’t sit on them. There might be only a one in five chance that the car actually has an alarm system and an even smaller chance that it is activated, but why take chances? One active alert in ten is enough and you’ll have a horde of zombies coming to look what the noise is about. And they will find you instead. Two or three years down the road, you might be able to get away with it, if the last smidgen of power has drained from the batteries, but you may still test it in a lab first.



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Zombie Survival Tip: Gun Use

Posted by on Jun 20, 2012 in Blog | 1 comment

Photo: Wickenden

Knowing how to use and having a gun is important, but remember; A single shot can be heard from upwards to 5 miles away (depending on gun and area). You don’t want 5 miles worth of zombies coming to a dinner bell. Hand held weapons and silent projectiles are key for a quick and quiet kill.



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The Secret World Beta Weekend

Posted by on Jun 18, 2012 in Blog, Featured, Guides, The Secret World | 0 comments

I went into this beta weekend for “The Secret World” expecting to collect some material about the mechanics of the game. Last time I played I hadn’t touched tradeskills and didn’t pay to much attention to combat and or skills in general, either. Guess what? I didn’t get around to gather more facts. Instead I solved puzzles, listened to voice overs and pushed dialog buttons to take in more and more of the great story this game is telling their players.
Savage Coast

Competing secret societies are meddling in the world’s affairs, fighting each other and common enemies. Powerful mega corporations and powerless and corrupt political organisations are players as well. It’s never really clear if you fight paranormal activities or you are looking at failed experiments of the other involved parties. It isn’t clear if the experiments have failed, either. Chaos is introduced, just to learn how the system reacts. Every conspiracy theory is true, the water supply has been messed with, and they are ready to attach a tracking device to your spine anytime.

That’s what differentiates this game from all other MMO’s. The setting is unique and the story is unique. Do not approach it as a hack and slash game, don’t ask about the endgame. Sit back and enjoy the show, push that dialogue button again a few more times and pay attention. Take copious notes. You may need that information, or it hides yet another conspiracy.

There are more differences to other MMORPG’s. The game doesn’t have any classes nor levels. Only skills and abilities. These will improve over time and more abilities can be added. Your class is determined by the abilities you choose. Of interest is the fact that you are allowed to put only 7 active and 7 passive abilities into your hotbars. Skill levels replace classic levels, but with much more granularity, since those levels exist for almost ever type of equipment, weapons, talismans, belts and rings.

Other reviewers have complained about the quality of combat. I didn’t pay much attention, I just played. There is PVP, but I haven’t checked it myself. I’m just not interested in it. I still need to explore tradeskills. The basic mechanics are there, but what you can do with the items you collect isn’t fully clear, yet.

There will be another beta weekend starting this Friday, lets find out if I’ll collect more facts about the game or get lost in the content.


© Disclaimer: The Secret World
"The Secret World" is a registered trademark of Funcom GmbH. All logos, images and names are intellectual properties of Funcom GmBH unless otherwise noted. This site is not endorsed by or affiliated with Funcom GmbH.


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Zombie Survival Tip: Outsmart them

Posted by on Jun 12, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Zombie Survival Tips

Photo by: Sahlgoode

One of the biggest advantages you’ll have over your new found Zombie problem besides coordination and speed is the ability to plan your next move and have a contingency plan if things go wrong. Use these to your advantage. A simple start is always knowing your exits, quick climb areas and safe rest areas. Remember nowhere is safe, just “safer” and higher up is always better then hiding on the ground. A zombie might not see you hiding in the cupboard taking a nap, but he might stumble upon a tasty, napping treat.



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What I Learned from the Newbie Blogger Initiative

Posted by on Jun 4, 2012 in Blog | 2 comments

Newbie Blogger InitativeAbout a month ago Syp started the Newbie Blogger Initiative on his Biobreak Blog.  Since then about 100 sponsor blogs and 100 newbie blogs have joined the initiative.  Probably more than 5000 blog posts (my halftime count was 2540) have been produced by them in the month of May. I am a bit late for the NBI conclusion party, since I’ve been traveling for a week, but here’s a list of changes and ideas inspired by a month of community building among MMORPG bloggers.

  • Added 120 blogs to my RSS reader. This count isn’t final, since there some blogs that joined late. I will have to cut back that number, since I just can’t handle the volume.
  • Followed about 120 IDs more on twitter, effectively changing my plan for its use.  Initially, I thought to tweet only new articles, follow gaming companies and some key people in the industry. It would allow me to keep track of news, but to keep out the chatter. But in the end, that’s not the way it works. In order to be a member of the community, you have to interact with the community. Just linking new blog posts will be seen as pure noise and ignored. It did help that I found tdash and hootsuite as  Twitter readers helps me to manage the noise levels.
  • Aggronaut’s article about  the Google Reader Blogroll helped me managing my own blogroll and the MMONBI newbie and sponsor lists art the World’s End Tavern helped me keeping it up to date.
  • Changed the WP permalink structure, without yyyy/mm. It sounds innocent, but having dated links as a result of a Google search decreases the chance of being read. Until recently it WordPress advised against it for performance reasons, but those problems have been resolved since the most recent WordPress versions.
  • I decided against using livefyre in favor of commentluv. In the end livefyre will just collect to much data about me and my visitors. And it’s missing the commentluv functionality, most importantly the link back to a commenters recent post
  • Due to this post at TL-DR, I’ve become more diligent in tagging my posts, not necessarily the visible tags, but the Meta keywords, which are usually only visble to search engine spiders
  • I am using Photodropper now for stock photography. It allows me to insert creative commons licensed pictures into my through a pretty simple search in Flickr. This was mentioned in some discussion on the NBI headquarters forum
  • From Hawtpants of the Republic the headquarters forum comes advice about RSS footer, a plugin to add a copyright notice into the RSS feed. Unfortunately this has become necessary, since eventually you will find your content on some scrapers website.

There are more items on my To Do list because of the Newbie Blogger Initiative. It’s all a matter of getting myself organized again.

And here’s the big link dump to all newbie and sponsor articles, originally posted at Biobreak.

New blogs to check out:

Sponsor advice posts:



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