General trends, the core tank toolset, and is survival more fun than threat?

(Firstly, apologies for the flood of WoW related posts. I’m trying to use WoW class changes as a jumping off point for more general discussion, but yeah I get that the blog is a bit focussed right now.) Usiel asked in comments if I had any thoughts about the bigger picture for Cataclysm, based on [...]

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It came from the PUG: Don’t worry, dwarves are cool!

One of the interesting things that can happen when you use the random dungeon finder in WoW is that you get sent into a half completed instance. This always feels to me like being the investigator in the denoument of an old fashioned detective story. You know that five people must have originally zoned in, [...]

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Stories of the Week

I thought it might be fun to experiment for a month or so by summarising some main gaming related stories of the week on Sundays, with some links and comments. Warhammer Online takes your lunch money Another nail in the coffin of the subscription based MMO was placed this week, as Mythic Entertainment made one [...]

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My adventures at eastercon: admissions of a convention noob

So, last weekend was the big adventure. I went to Eastercon, held this year at a hotel near Heathrow, which was my first experience of a SF convention. It wasn’t a lone expedition; I went with my sister and our respective partners for moral support. This is one of the larger UK SF conventions (from [...]

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Warrior Change Analysis: Fury is the new black (actually it was also the old black)

Reading through the list of warrior changes, there were two things that heroic leaped out at me. 1. Heroic Leap, it’s all about the fluff Heroic leap sounds cool and all, but it’s functionally equivalent to  Charge + Thunderclap. And to hammer home the similarity, Juggernaut and Warbringer will allow this to be used in [...]

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Ramping up the Cataclysm PR, and what I want to see for warriors

One thing I had forgotten until I saw the first of the class previews yesterday was how important these were from a PR point of view. All it takes is for Blizzard to announce one really cool sounding ability for a beloved class. And then the next expansion starts to feel more personal. For example, [...]

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Should game companies have a duty of care?

I have talked over the last few weeks about the challenges of playing more casually, or adjusting to having less time available when you want to play with people who can put in a lot more time to a game. But one notion that hasn’t been challenged is that  dedicated players want to spend more [...]

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[Cataclysm] Rage changes, and the beginning of the end

Blizzard picked the Easter Weekend to begin dribbling out the hard information about class changes for Cataclysm. We know that there will be many changes, and that talent trees are being completely reworked. We also know that some classes will change more than others, and that the design team want to take the opportunity to [...]

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Playing Games while you Work/ Play

I did have a chance to sit and listen to a panel yesterday on social games with a mix of people who love them and who don’t. And one of the things I really picked up was that players enjoyed having a game that they could play while doing something else. And for all people [...]

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Transferable skills in MMOs, and Convention Jitters

I had a chance to run the most recent six man instance in LOTRO last week – Sammath Gul (thanks to everyone who came along, especially Arbitrary for being so patient with us.) I thought it was a really fun instance, and definitely a style of fight and layout from which WoW is moving away. [...]

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