The sentence every tank loves to hear

I can’t believe this is the best 2 handed weapon that has ever dropped in our raid, and it’s gone to a tank! (For those curious – we had an odd raid composition when we took out heroic Marrowgar for the first time.)

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[It came from the PUG]: No one knows the way back from the graveyard!

So the instance in question last week was Blood Furnace – I’ve been finally levelling my bank alt. (Hurrah!) Things were going well, the tank was getting more and more confident with every pull. We killed a boss and kept going. Then the tank got a bit over-confident, pulled too many groups at a time [...]

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Free-to-Play Hardcore

As the countdown to LotRO going free-to-play starts, I’ve found myself pondering all sorts of random elements about games going free-to-play. Possibly the most bizarre of these, is the concept of hardcore and how it relates to the micro-payment structure. Will the new hardcore be those who reach the level cap without paying a penny? [...]

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Gaming News: Acclaim shuts down games, Google game dev advocate leaves, Digital Chocolate sues Zynga, THQ says used games are evil, Kinect will feature voice control

Another quiet week, this time featuring a selection of bad news. The EQ2X open beta is also in progress at the moment. Anyone trying that? I made a cool half elf guardian called Spinks and am quite liking New Halas. The streaming works like a dream – it’s a very fast install indeed and gets [...]

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Being rewarded for what you were going to do anyway (Rested xp in FF14, guild achievements in WoW).

Final Fantasy 14 is shaping up to be more innovative in many ways than many commenters were expecting. The creators have said explicitly that their main audience is not current MMO hardcore players. Instead they’re aiming at players who like the Final Fantasy games and maybe haven’t gotten into MMOs before. So given that accessibility [...]

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Wow, I’m nearly 80!

I have been the most casual of WoW players since my return near the beginning of the year. I re-joined to try the Refer-a-Friend thing with Spinks and we zoomed through levels 1-40, the bit I was dreading from over-playing them previously. But then I took a break, the R-A-F thing ran out, and we [...]

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2011: Year of the Diablo Clones?

I’m not sure if everything old is new again at the moment, or if other companies just tend to follow Blizzard’s trends. But it does look as though group based PvE type games are on a roll at the moment. First is Diablo 3 itself, of course. I will be amazed if this does not [...]

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How to acquire Wrath (level 80) heirloom items in WoW

Heirloom Items have been one of the great innovations of the current Warcraft expansion. There are three reasons for this: They are account bound. You can pass them freely between any character on your server which is on the same account, even between horde and alliance. These items are designed for alts. Whereas a normal [...]

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If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a quest

There was a time a few years back in which it felt as though everything in MMOs was a quest. Quests were the new hotness, back in an era where one of WoW’s major selling points on release was that you could level purely by questing. The standard way to show players what they were [...]

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Gaming News: Gamescom News (GW2, Diablo III et al), Skaven for Warhammer Online, Age of Empires goes F2P, Blizzard sues private server, 90% kids in the US play online games

It’s been a week of new trailers and press releases, as opposed to actual news. One of the more interesting forum snippets that Player vs Developer picked up is that the majority of F2P players in Dungeons and Dragons Online don’t reach the endgame. I’m not surprised by this, given that the free to play [...]

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