Question of the Day: Alt accounts for the win?

Back when I was playing Dark Age of Camelot, it was pretty much de rigeur for anyone playing seriously to run two accounts. One for the main character/s and one for a buffbot. It was a ‘feature’ of that game that there was one buffing spec, and that buffs could be cast out of group [...]

Read Full Post »

Power to the players! The power of consumer voice, exit, and loyalty.

As players, we often feel powerless in the face of buffs, nerfs, and patches. The devs provide and we consume. But when a big player protest breaks out, as happened with EVE this weekend, it’s time to reconsider how much power the player base actually has. Turns out that it’s not insignificant at all. List [...]

Read Full Post »

[GW2] I want to be under the sea ..

I am always taken aback when players rant about how much they hate underwater zones and underwater fighting. Some of my favourite times in MMOs have been spent happily adventuring underwater. I have fond memories of DaoC’s Trials of Atlantis underwater areas, I liked swimming around and opening lobster traps in WoW’s desolace, I’ve enjoyed [...]

Read Full Post »

[EVE] Monocalypse Now

So the new EVE cash shop and captain’s quarters debacle turns out to be the gift that keeps on giving. For a game that’s quite niche (albeit popular in its niche) they are certainly generating a lot of press at the moment. I have been mildly surprised at quite how much blogspace and press EVE [...]

Read Full Post »

[News Bits] DA2 DLC, How much do popcap want for that zombie?, CoH goes F2P, Diablo 3 followers for normal mode only, more on EVE

Apologies for a bits and pieces posts, there’s a lot of news out this week that I thought was interesting but not really enough to write a whole blog post about. First DLC announced for Dragon Age 2 Arb and I are keeping a weather eye out for announcements about Comic Con 2011 since we’re [...]

Read Full Post »

[EVE] Vanity costs, and here’s where you start paying!

The latest EVE patch introduced the ‘Noble Exchange Cash Shop’ where players can spend real money on cosmetic gear for their prettified new toons (which are very pretty, I think I wrote about the new character generator a while back). Here’s their dev blog about the vanity store. Jester at Jester’s Trek sums up what [...]

Read Full Post »

The thankless life of a guild leader in a MMO

Everything you need to know about guild leading can be summarised in  that the #1 piece of advice most existing guild leaders give to someone who is considering it is “Don’t do it.” It is terrifically fun to build and run a guild, but it can also be crazy stressful and your guild members will [...]

Read Full Post »

What if we had a more social endgame?

One of the things I’ve been reading this week is Too Damn Epic’s discussion of different types of MMO endgame, where he wonders why things have gotten so repetitive. He discusses raiding (PvE) endgame, PvP endgames and territory wars, and having the game actually end (eg. Tale in the Desert). Go check it out. Aside [...]

Read Full Post »

[Rift] The wonders of cosmetic clothing

“People always ask me how long it takes to do my hair. I don’t know, I’m never there.” – Dolly Parton I thought I’d show off today a couple of my sets of cosmetic clothing on my mage in Rift. These are all made up of a mixture of drops which I thought looked cool, [...]

Read Full Post »

Commercialisation, and the appeal of an amateur fanbase

A lot of gamers will tell you that the opposite of pro is noob. It’s one opposite, I guess, but back in the meatworld the most common opposite of professional is amateur. Amateur means a lot of things. It can mean bad (amateurish isn’t usually good), it can mean hobbyist, it can mean idealistic. For [...]

Read Full Post »