It came from the PUG: When good players go bad!

This week’s pick up group story is a sad tale of miscommunication, failure on behalf of everyone involved (including yours truly) to act like grown ups, and some inventive griefing where the responsible player forgot just one key thing … The scene is Old Kingdom. I was tanking. The group was itching to move quickly [...]

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[STO] The Tribble Evolution Flowchart

Tribble breeding may be one of the strangest mini-games to have ever hit any MMO ever. Actually breeding the things is very easy: Take your tribble. Put in an enclosed area (such as your inventory) with anything edible and spare space. Wait one hour. And that’s pretty much it. Given enough food, tribbles expand to [...]

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I love the Ashen Verdict really

Captain Arnath really is the whiniest Argent Crusader, you’d think he’d be happy to help one of our top apothecaries support the war effort but no … whine whine whine … I guess someone in Blizzard HQ didn’t like him much either. I can only applaud the weekly sacrificial blood elf.

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Could games do more to help us make friends?

One of my great disappointments with MMOs is that devs don’t do enough to recognise that they are social games with social elements. But through the long history of gaming, games have primarily had a social function. Often gambling was involved, but equally the game was something that a family could play together. Games were [...]

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Time to bring back the 40 man raids? Or what makes a good public raid anyway?

I had a chance to join a random pick up raid in STO recently. The window came up, I clicked yes to zone in and … It was … duh duh DUH … the crystalline entity!  There were ships all over the place, no one had a clue what to do, local chat was buzzing, [...]

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Thought of the Day: Don’t leave me hanging!

Of all the issues with Icecrown Citadel, the most irritating by far is that Mal’Ganis doesn’t make an appearance. How annoying is that? Especially after you did a whole quest chain in Icecrown which ended with him running off and warning you that, “You’ll never defeat the Lich King without my help!” I guess he [...]

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State of the LFD: Repetition, repetition, repetition

Patch 3.3 in WoW was released in the US back on the 8th December 2009. That means we have had the random dungeon finder for almost three months – my how time flies when you’re having fun. There’s no doubt that the new tool has been a great success. It has never been easier to [...]

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If you were a time-traveller…

So assume you have a working time machine, and you don’t want to use it for anything boring like picking winning lottery tickets or teaching the Elizabethans about penicillin. Nope. Instead you decide to dip into your MMO of choice (or maybe even switch games altogether) and use your foreknowledge to have more fun in [...]

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Which came first, the game or the story?

I’ve read a few posts recently on immersion in gaming, and Toskk summed up the problem neatly here. There are different types of immersion, and they don’t all happily coexist. If I’m immersed in a story, the absolute last thing I want to do is stop and min-max my character stats (or worse, be forced [...]

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Allods Online, and Putting a Price on Virtual Goods

This week sees the soft launch of Allods Online, a fantasy MMO with steampunk and space opera influences from Russian based Astrum Nival. Although the game is free to play, they’ve been careful to emphasise the phrase subscriptionless, or no subscription required. Because of course, it’s only free up to the point where players dip [...]

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