[Pirates] The lure of a real world setting

As you can see, my Naval Officer character in Pirates of the Burning Sea is going up in the world. This was taken approximately two coats ago – I’m measuring my levels in coats because every so often you get a career quest which is rewarded with a new title and piece of cosmetic clothing. [...]

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Thought of the day: More on social responsibility

I’ve been quite interested in the debates Tobold has been having with all and sundry lately on the subject of social responsibility in MMOs. My personal view is that the only ‘social responsibility’ any player has is just not to go out of their way to chase anyone else out of the game. I will [...]

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Can You Dig It?

Recently I’ve been doing quite a bit of Archaeology on my Horde level 85 char. This is the same char I switched over from Alliance and duoing with Spinks, to join her much larger guild over on the Horde side. I love being a goblin, I seriously do. But I’m finding it quite overwhelming to [...]

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SWTOR rumoured to launch in September. DOOM foretold.

We haven’t had a story in awhile about how SWTOR is inevitably doomed, but fortunately an analyst has stepped into the breath with a breathtaking report that “EA investors are wary.” But how does he know? Maybe he’s spoken to a few in the games industry, but we don’t know how he knows. So he’s [...]

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Gaming culture: Bulletstorm and grown up kids

I’ve been working recently with people who are fans of computer games. “Great,” you think, “we’ll have so much in common.” Well … yes and no. They play shooters on consoles. I play PC games. They like corpse camping people in Black Ops and I’m not big on PvP. And I get this cognitive dissonance [...]

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Brief look at the EVE character creator

If you are an EVE fan, you’ll by now be well aware of the upgrade to the character creator that came as part of the recent Incursion upgrade. My understanding is that Incursion itself is going to be in several parts, a phased approach to introducing a new expansion. The other features of the recent [...]

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Can talking to NPCs ever be fun?

Justin Achilli (a name that’ll be familiar to Vampire tabletop players since he was line developer for White Wolf, now working on CCP’s new MMOs) wrote this week about task resolution systems for conversation. The vast majority of computer roleplaying games are designed with combat first and foremost. “Roleplaying” in a computer game context really [...]

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[Cataclysm] Raiding Update with Bulletpoints

1. Good week for my raid group, we’ve knocked over Magmaw, Omnomtrom, and Halfus Wyrmbane in 25 man mode! Hurrah! (My kill of Halfus was in 10 man mode last week but I don’t think you can tell that from the Armoury feed.) 2. Still behind the ferals, rogues, death knights and enhancement shaman on [...]

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Question of the Day: How many mounts do you really need?

In comments on yesterday’s post, Theladas wrote: Titles and tabards and mounts from achievements are just as permanent as they were Which is true, of course. But does leave me wondering how many titles and tabards and mounts a character really needs. For me, once I have found one that I like, I’m not in [...]

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Antisocial: That word doesn’t mean what you think it means

Tobold kicked up a stir yesterday by opining that dps deserve their long LFD heroic queues (40 mins or so, compared with much shorter queues for healers or tanks) because they are shirking their social responsibility. Commenters on the post have been even stronger, claiming that dps are antisocial and that it’s all because hybrids [...]

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