MMORPGs Remind Me Of Food

Playing my favorite massively multiplayer online role-playing games always makes me hungry, even when I'm not at home and spending countless hours—not to mention money—in some Internet gaming cafe. This is because MMORPGs remind me of food. Of course, food also reminds me of some MMORPGs. Well, you get the picture.

Here's a list of well-known free-to-play MMOs, the food they remind me of, and why I think of having a meal while playing them:



Allods Online - Filet Mignon. Mouthwatering, to say the least. Allods Online is definitely a force to be reckoned with as the food it reminds me of is a powerhouse of culinary delight. The problem is Filet Mignon is expensive, and the thought of a bill the size of Rhode Island often disuades your tummy from its flights of fancy. Yes, playing Allods Online can be expensive, but that shouldn't stop you from enjoying a hearty meal.

Atlantica Online - Clubhouse Sandwich. Altantica Online is like a whopping clubhouse sandwich that's oozing with meat and vegetables and literally bursting at the seams. The game is chock-full of content, but some players either get overwhelmed or turned off by the amount of information they need to digest. There's also some sort of parallelism between the number of portions of a clubhouse sandwich and the number of mercenaries you can have in an Atlantica Online formation. But then again, that's just me.

Cabal Online - Ginisang Ampalaya (Sauteed Bitter Gourd). Some like it, some don't. This is the essence of my comparison of Cabal Online to a plate full of sauteed bitter gourd. And when you're young and don't know any better, you are usually forced to eat the stuff. Like Cabal, eating ginisang ampalaya is an acquired taste.

Casvian - Chop Suey (Stir-Fried Vegetables). This uniquely Asian dish turns off most kids as its main ingredients are, well, vegetables, and you know how children react to seeing—and thinking about eating—veggies. Most children avoid it like the plague, but adults sure like it. Casvian is a healthy distraction, with hundreds of elements that remind you of the variety of vegetables in a dish of chop suey.

Granado Espada (Sword of the New World) - Paksiw na Lechon (Roasted Pork Stewed in Vinegar). Paksiw na lechon is a recurring dish in the culinary culture of my homeland, and Granado Espada is much like it in the sense that the thought of playing the game haunts one's mind. I'm an on-again-off-again Granado Espada pioneer and I find the game, like a heaping bowl of roasted pork stewed in vinegar, as rarely stale but too much for a single person to finish.

That's all I have for now. I might continue my list later in the week. For now, let me go grab something to munch on while playing one of my favorite massively multiplayer online games.

How about you? What's your favorite MMO and what food does it remind you of?

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How To Block Spammers In Allods Online

In line with The MMOsh Pit's campaign against spam in massively multiplayer online games, I am launching today a series of guides on how to block most forms of spam in some titles that I play. The first game on the block is Allods Online, a recently released free-to-play MMORPG from Gala-Net Inc. and its gPotato portal.



Spam bots started appearing in the two North American servers of Allods Online—Nezeb and Tensess—about a week into the open beta phase of the game and elicited the ire of most players who wanted nothing more than to strangle the unscrupulous individuals behind the bots.

Unfortunately, not all Allods Online players know how to block spam messages, and this step-by-step guide is designed to help them through the process.



How To Block Spammers In Allods Online Step #1: Identify the in-game name of the spam bot. Those familiar with the chat interface of most MMORPGs can do this easily. If you're having trouble pinning down the spammer's name, which is especially true in Allods because the chat window keeps scrolling, refer to the screenshot.

If you still can't identify the name after several attempts, I suggest you hit the Print Screen button (Prt Scr/SysRq on most modern keyboards), open the Allods Online screenshot folder (usually found in C:\gPotato.com\Allods Online\Personal\Screenshots) and scroll to the last screenshot in the folder, open the file using a image editor (eg. Photoshop or Paint), and zoom in on the screenshot's chat window. Since the screenshot is not moving, it's easier to correctly read the spammer's in-game name.



How To Block Spammers In Allods Online Step #2: Click the Social button on the bottom left portion of your Allods Online interface (highlighted with a red circle in the screenshot) to bring up your character's Friends List. Obviously, we're not about to block our friends so click on the Ignore List tab of the Social window.



How To Block Spammers In Allods Online Step #3: Now that your Social window is showing the Ignore List, click on the Add button to open a new window where you can enter the in-game name of the spammer. Keep in mind that before you click on the Accept button, double check the spelling of the name you've just entered or else the spammer's chat messages won't be blocked.



How To Block Spammers In Allods Online Step #4: Check the chat window to make sure the spammer you're intending to block has indeed been blocked. If you can still read the spammer's messages, go back and redo all the steps.

Hope this simple Allods Online guide has helped improve your gameplay, not to mention your sanity. Stay tuned for more guides!

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MMORPG: Get Rid Of Spam Bots, Please!

This is a shoutout to developers and publishers of massively multiplayer online games: "Get rid of spam bots!" For those who remain unaware, spam bots are not exclusive to email and social networking sites like Friendster and Facebook where spam goes into the inboxes of unsuspecting users on a daily basis.

The only difference between receiving spam in email and getting spam in an online game is, in the latter, spam comes in a wide array of forms, from chat, a common function of MMOs (for obvious reasons, as it is the only way to communicate in a virtual world ... at least at the moment), to whispers and in-game mail.



What are they spamming? Well, mostly advertisements for websites that sell in-game currency in exchange for real money, or some sort of service that almost always include power leveling. Yes, some people actually pay other people to level characters in online games.

The sad part is some MMO developers and publishers take pains to either block these spammers from setting up shop in their virtual worlds while some don't—at least nothing that is transparent to the inquisitive minds of some players.

Take, for instance, two of the MMORPGs that I currently play: Allods Online and Atlantica Online. These two are great games. For me (read: in my opinion), these two titles are at the cutting edge of today's generation of free-to-play online games. They do suffer, however, from minor flaws, and foremost among these is the existence of spam bots in the game.

In Allods Online, owners of these spam bots take advantage of the game's multichat functions, particularly the one that lets players broadcast messages to all players in a given map or area (for reference, check out the screenshot). Thank the gaming gods that they haven't exploited the in-game mail yet!

In Atlantica Online, spam bots have been plaguing all servers since the commercial launch. What's happening in Atlantica is actually worse than the situation in Allods Online. In NDOORS Interactive's gem of a game, spammers not only utilize the chat system, they also send spam mail to players via the mail system.

The question now is: Whose responsibility is it to get rid of these spammers?

My take on the matter is the responsibility falls on MMO developers and publishers. Hey, players may be inconvenienced by the daily barrage of advertisements in their chat windows, but they're not the ones losing money—that is, unless they patronize these so-called gold sellers whose reputation is always suspect.

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