Gravity noted via twitter that he’d offered some suggestions to Flying Labs (creators of Pirates of the Burning Sea) on how to improve their website to better attract new players – it’s a post on their suggestions forum. <…> new users will make a fairly quick prejudicial judgement on whether to download the game. They’ll [...]
Archive for April, 2011
In which we give marketing advice to MMO publishers
Posted in general mmo, tagged lotro, marketing advice, mmo publisher, pirates of the burning sea, sony, wow on April 29, 2011 | 7 Comments »
[WoW] The million dollar question with patch 4.1/4.2
Posted in general mmo, tagged firelands, patch 4.2, preview, question, returning, warcraft on April 28, 2011 | 55 Comments »
Today the patch 4.2 hype was released with not only a trailer for the upcoming raid instances, but also a timetable for future hype. Which is handy because now we can schedule it around the royal wedding (or around the unwedding TV timetable if you are not a royalist.) There is a fair amount of [...]
Dynamic Events: A funny thing happened on the way to the quest giver…
Posted in general mmo, tagged dynamic events, player run events, public quests, raids on April 28, 2011 | 8 Comments »
One upon a long time ago, I was one of the storytelling staff on a MUSH (think of this as an online roleplaying game). And we used to come up with weird and wacky ideas for cool plots to introduce to help players get involved with each other and with the overall story. One of [...]
[Rift] Trion was able to build this in a cave … with a box of scraps!
Posted in general mmo, tagged cosmetic clothing, dungeon finder, patch 1.2, rift, trion on April 27, 2011 | 14 Comments »
Another day, another set of Rift patch notes. Trion have been adding stuff to their game at a fairly spectacular pace, and the next patch promises a slew of new types of rift, cosmetic clothing, and a massive amount of tweaks to classes, zones, quests, and instances. Further in the future will be the Rift [...]
[LOTRO] Turbine to take over the EU Servers
Posted in general mmo, tagged codemasters, global, lotro, takeover, turbine on April 26, 2011 | 9 Comments »
Now this was somewhat unexpected news – Turbine will be taking over the running of the EU LOTRO servers from Codemasters from June 1st 2011. And all EU players will need to migrate their accounts to US servers –0- lifetime accounts, characters, items et al will all be moved across smoothly, Turbine claim. Here’s the [...]
Go straight to max level, do not pass GO
Posted in general mmo, tagged eq2, max level on April 25, 2011 | 19 Comments »
Abuzz in the MMO blogs this week is an idea that was thrown out by devs in the EQ2 forum, which is to allow returning players to create a max level character. Note: They aren’t actually doing this (yet), just discussing the idea. Syp wonders if this proposal was a wise thing to throw out to [...]
Tutorial zones, and experienced players
Posted in general mmo, tagged experienced, newbie, starting zone, tutorial on April 23, 2011 | 12 Comments »
One of the major challenges for computer game designers is simply that of how to teach the player to play the game, whilst keeping them interested enough to keep playing. Tobold commented last week, for example, that he didn’t want to play a game through hours of boredom to get to the interesting part, which [...]
Changing attitudes towards crowd control
Posted in general mmo, tagged crowd control, rift, warcraft on April 22, 2011 | 33 Comments »
Crowd control: the ability to take at least one enemy temporarily out of the fight by use of mind control, hypnotism, a cosh over the head, crazy transformation spell, rooting them to the ground, freezing them in ice – it’s as old as Dungeons and Dragons itself, which makes it rather older as a concept [...]
[Rift] What if you held an event and everybody came?
Posted in general mmo, tagged event, foul cascade, rift, river of souls on April 19, 2011 | 7 Comments »
random picture of a life rift, it’s pretty cool though. If you have been following the Rift gossip, you’ll know that the River of Souls live event that they had been running recently came to a head and an abrupt end. The first stage of the event lasted for a couple of weeks, involved daily [...]
Thought of the Day: It’s so hard to talk about difficulty
Posted in general mmo, tagged cataclysm, difficulty, dragon age, heroics, overtuned, raids, torchlight, undertuned on April 18, 2011 | 38 Comments »
The problem with discussing difficulty in games (and particularly MMOs) is that as soon as you comment that something is hard, you lay yourself open to loads of hardcore fanboys/girls leaping on your back and proclaiming that you are a noob and should l2p. Or else suggesting that you have no right to judge the [...]
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