It’s hard to make easy games

Simon Foster: It’ll be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. Toby Wright: No, it’s going to be difficult-difficult-lemon-difficult. – In the Loop The great challenge of MMOs has always been to get massive amounts of people all playing together happily. That means people from different cultures, timezones, and with different amounts of time to play: Hello 24/7 servers. That means [...]

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Star Trek Online – Beta Roundup

Star Trek is surely one of the best loved IPs of all time. It has spawned numerous TV series, films, books, comics, conferences, theme pubs, university courses, RPGs, computer games, Barbie dolls, and assorted other merchandise. This is the IP that INVENTED slashfic. Let’s pause and think about that for a moment. Ok, done. And [...]

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It came from the PUG: The Nature of Evil

He does have a point.

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Icecrown Citadel: Is tanking getting dull?

So, yesterday I was pondering what makes the tanking side of a raid encounter fun for me. And the reason was that I spotted this thread on the official forums, where an old school raiding tank is finding that the ICC encounters fail to thrill. …on most of these fights I would much rather just [...]

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What do you expect to get for your monthly subscription?

It’s hard to put a value on content, but the expectations of the MMO community have changed over the past few years. Whereas once, access to the virtual world with all its trappings was considered worth the price of entry, we now expect a stream of additional content patches to justify the monthly fees. Or [...]

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10 factors that make a fun tanking fight

This may be hard to believe for those who have never trod the hallowed path of the main tank, but staring at giant boss toenails for hours at a time while hammering out your main threat rotation can pall. You sense that there is activity going on elsewhere in the room as raid members make [...]

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Battlegrounds for Everquest 2

In one of the more unexpected announcements I’ve ever seen, SOE unveil their next great idea for EQ2. Battlegrounds. Due for release on Feb 16th, there are going to be 3 instanced battlegrounds on offer, a 6v6 capture the flag scenario, a 24v24 hold territory scenario, and a 6v6 kill the dude with the thing [...]

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All day, and all of the night

One of the characteristics of MMOs is that they’re available 24/7. But I wonder how big a selling point this really is. In MUD days, it was important because it meant that the game was accessible to people from different time zones. It was also a pain in the neck because if the game crashed [...]

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Picking Alts, and Seeing how the other Half Live

One of my favourite parts of going to a new restaurant is poring over the menu. You scan over the different items, mentally imagining how they might taste. You pause at foods that you either don’t get often at home, or that bring back fond memories of previous meals. Then you change your mind at [...]

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A new career beckons

I wonder what a launch officer does? Oh. Well, I could push a boat out into a river too, I guess. Wonder how well it pays. (Yes, Mirkwood is murky.)

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