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20 entries. 12,179 words.

November, 2013

  • Maybe It’s Time For A Break. 2013-11-04 8:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    Herding Cats has an interesting post up about how we, the gaming community, may have shot ourselves in the foot by telling MMO developers to limit cash shop purchases to cosmetic items so that the game won’t turn pay-to-win. But she argues that when you play an MMO only for cosmetic items, a cosmetic cash shop is pay-to-win. I’m one of those people who unofficially agreed that cosmetic items are fine in cash shops, because I personally don’t care that much about cosmetic items. I mean, if I run across a neat-looking item, I’ll be all like, “Yay, that looks cool, I’m glad I found it!” But I don’t often set out on any adventures with an objective of getting a cosmetic item. I just pick them up if I “happen” to come across them in the normal course of playing. 464 words.
  • Achievements – The Journey Is Part of The Reward. 2013-11-09 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    Lots of talk about achievements. Are they good? Are they bad? MMO Gypsy hates them (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RagingMonkeys/~3/UCUa6ra8IUg/achievement-hate-exploration-and-mystery.html), Herding Cats defends them (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/machiavelliscat/xgUW/~3/EBQ0bOGdQLk/), and CuppyVille relies on them (http://cuppyville.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/in-which-i-defend-achievements-in-mmos/). Me? I tend to ignore them. It’s true that I’m an Explorer on the Bartle test, so you might think I’d be siding with Syp in saying that achievements have destroyed the MMO genre. Well, first of all, I don’t think the genre has been destroyed at all; I think it’s far better now than it’s ever been. Also, I don’t feel like the Bartle Explorer fits me very well. A Bartle Explorer sounds like someone who will divert from a quest line to wander off into the jungle to see what’s there, because he saw a funny-looking knot on a tree, and then he’ll cross the river past the jungle, and then climb the mountain across from the river, and so on. Totally A.D.D. in other words. I do that occasionally, but these days I rarely go out into the jungle unless there is a quest telling me to. 760 words.
  • On the Removal of Leveling. 2013-11-22 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    With the announcement of Warlords of Draenor, there was a bit of buzz around the MMO-sphere about the role of the leveling process. I was struck by a post on Healing the Masses suggesting that it’s time to remove the leveling game entirely from MMOs so that we no longer segregate the players into groups that can’t play together. … an ideology that is slowly dying, an ideology that never really belonged much in the first place in this genre. 585 words.

December, 2013

  • Which Fingers for WASD. 2013-12-09 4:00 PM.
    • Gaming
    • Discussion

    I’ve always wondered something. Most of the world uses WASD for their keyboard controls, right? I’m assuming so because that’s how every game is pre-configured. I, however, use ESDF for my keyboard controls, so I have to change the defaults on every single game I play. I am not bitter about that. Mostly. I chose ESDF when I re-did my Quake keyboard binds way back in the day because it seemed like the natural choice, because my ring finger, middle finger, and index finger naturally rested on SDF anyway. If I needed to type a quick message, my fingers were right there ready to do so. 227 words.
  • Re-Using Character Names. 2013-12-11 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    I’ve been thinking about character names. Normally I make up new names for all my characters, but I know a lot of people carry over their names from one game to another. You always see people trying “get their names” when a new game launches. One day on a whim I decided to re-use a couple of names from Rift characters for some EQ2 alts to see what it was like, and I found it very weird. 149 words.
  • Invert Mouse Forever. 2013-12-17 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    Why doesn’t everyone use invert mouse? I simply cannot comprehend it. Yet informal polls show that only about 30% of people use invert mouse. I choose the invert mouse setting because I want to mimic the controls of a flight simulator, which is pretty much the de-facto standard 3D environment control scheme. In a flight simulator (and presumably a real airplane), you push the stick forward to go down, and you pull the stick back to go up. So clearly when using a mouse, you should roll the mouse forward to aim down, and roll the mouse backward to aim up. 170 words.
  • 2013 MMOs In Review. 2013-12-30 3:11 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    I hate these year-in-review kinds of posts. So what do I do? Write one, of course. Because everyone’s doing it. This is my review of 2013. 2013 began with GW2 fizzling out because of its lack of endgame progression. I still popped in now and then throughout the year to look at the Living Story but it’s just an occasional diversion. I played in one of the last betas of Defiance before it came out in April. I wanted to like it, but I wasn’t hooked. I’m generally not a fan of shooter MMOs. (Late in the year, however, I bought the game and played a little bit more.) 407 words.
  • 2014 MMOs Coming Soon. 2013-12-31 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    I hate year-end posts, so here I am writing another one to talk about MMOs I’m looking forward to in 2014. Rift 3.0. I haven’t seen a release date, but they’re talking about releasing it in stages anyway, so I expect we’ll see the bulk of it in 2014. I hope to get a month of entertainment from the new stuff, maybe not contiguously though. WildStar. I’m planning to pre-order and play at launch, because I suspect everyone and their mother will be playing it and I don’t want to miss out. :) I anticipate at least a month of entertainment from it, and hopefully more. 482 words.

January, 2014

  • A Freshly-Formatted PC. 2014-01-06 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    I recently reformatted my PC and reinstalled Windows 7, so of course I had to re-install all my games. But instead of re-installing the seemingly hundreds of MMOs I previously had, I decided to limit the number of MMOs installed so I could try to cut down on this MMO ADD I’ve been experiencing. So far I’ve installed WoW, FFXIV, LotRO, SWTOR, EVE, and Mortal Online. (Well, and Steam, obviously.) By sheer coincidence, I happened to have active subscriptions for those games as well (except MO). I typically buy 3-month blocks of sub time and then cancel; the order that the subscriptions will expire over the next 3 months is: FFXIV, LotRO, EVE, SWTOR, then WoW. 213 words.
  • The Diefication of Star Wars Galaxies. 2014-01-07 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    I’ve been “into” Massively.com a lot lately, listening to their podcasts and watching their streams, and one thing I’ve noticed is that some of them have a total love affair with Star Wars: Galaxies. They talk about SWG like most other people talk about Everquest 1: They diefy it like it’s the greatest thing there ever was or ever will be. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that not only did I never play or even see it, I never even knew it was an MMORPG. 279 words.
  • Early Access MMOs and Character Wipes. 2014-01-10 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    There are a lot more “early access” games now than ever before, thanks to Steam and Kickstarter. Basically what this means is that some random, poor game developer can release what amounts to a semi-playable demo of their game and then ask people to buy it for a (surprisingly minor) discount, hoping that they’ll raise enough money and interest to fund the rest of the game development. In a lot of cases that is as janky as it sounds, because some Steam developers think it’s okay to put out crap that is buggy and unplayable, but I think it’s a concept that can work well for the MMO genre, since MMOs are almost always in constant flux even after their official releases anyway. MMO players as a whole should be used to bugs and change. 535 words.
  • Life Without MMO Guides. 2014-01-20 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    Have you ever wondered why there are so many MMO guides out there? Step-by-step walkthroughs and so forth? I think I know the answer. It’s because without Internet guides, most MMO game players would simply stand in one place and stare at the screen, paralyzed and unable to figure out what to do or how to do it. You can tell this from watching the global chat of a game that is in closed beta. It’s filled with non-stop questions that one might conceivably fall into the “duh” variety. How do we find this or that? How do we solve this puzzle? Where do we find this NPC? Where do we get crafting materials? How do we get past this monster? There are no handy guides to turn to, and obviously reading the quest text or any of the in-game hints are out of the question in this fast-paced, go-go-go world we live in. 234 words.
  • Changing the Holy Trinity. 2014-01-27 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Discussion

    I read Scree’s A Snapshot of Pantheon, an excellent summary of the things that Brad McQuaid wants to do with Kickstarter MMO Pantheon: Something of Something. I’ll save most of my comments on Brad’s game vision for another post, or never, because I don’t think it will get funded. The part about changing the Holy Trinity model is what stood out to me today. Apologies for quoting so much of this: 914 words.

May, 2014

  • PvE, PvP, and Racing. 2014-05-23 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • PvP
    • Responses
    • Discussion

    The topic of discussion from the NBI Talkback is whether or not PvE and PvP mix in MMOPRGs. At long last I have some time to write about it, now that everyone else has moved on. The answer is no, they don’t mix. Thanks for reading. But seriously, we’ve all seen the sharp divide between the PvE and PvP communities within any given MMORPG. In my opinion, it’s not because of the games or the players. The problem to me is that PvE and PvP require two entirely different competitive mindsets. 1,298 words.
  • On Hardcore Raiding. 2014-05-27 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Responses
    • Discussion

    After I listened to Massively’s latest podcast featuring an interview with WildStar developers, I realized that I hadn’t said anything about Carbine’s hardcore raiding philosophy, which is a topic of some mild controversy. One of them raid thingys, blatantly stolen from the WildStar site. If you aren’t aware, WildStar raids are supposed to be really hard like the old school raids of yore. They are taking the stance that their raids are meant for hardcore guilds and players only, and they won’t be dumbing them down over time like most other games do. Here is their video on them: 895 words.

April, 2017

  • Persona 5 and Streaming. 2017-04-17 3:00 PM.
    • Discussion

    Streaming… get it? [via Wikimedia Commons][1] I saw that the makers of Persona 5 made the odd choice of limiting streaming of their game. (I use the word “streaming” here to include Twitch and YouTube Let’s Play videos.) Liore and Eri also weighed in on this with contrasting viewpoints. I’d never heard of Persona 5 before this, and never heard of or played Persona 1 through 4, either. (I think it’s a console game from The East.) I don’t even know what kind of game it is. The point is I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m only interested in the intellectual property angle. 762 words.
  • Story In Video Games. 2017-04-27 3:00 PM.
    • Discussion

    A while back there was an article in The Atlantic with the rather controversial title Video Games Are Better Without Stories. I didn’t even know about the article-who looks for gaming articles in The Atlantic?-until I started to see tweets about it filter through my feeds, and I got the distinct impression that it was polarizing the gaming community (again). On one side, there are people saying, “Of course games are better with story what a dumb article.” On the other side, there are people saying, “Finally someone said what we’re all thinking.. story sucks!” There are literally no other opinions. Well, except this one. 1,086 words.

July, 2017

  • Ranking My Play Personalities. 2017-07-21 2:30 PM.
    • Discussion
    • Musings
    • Responses

    Thinking Play had a very interesting post recently about Play Personalities, something I had never heard of before. I recommend reading it. It’s a bit like a Meyers-Briggs test for how you spend your leisure time, or the Bartle Test. Here’s my self-assessment of how I fit the different play personalities: The Joker. Nope. Well, maybe a little. Sometimes I do like to poke fun at things that other people find deadly serious, much to my own detriment on Twitter. Although I am not a “class clown” by any stretch of the imagination. 508 words.

February, 2018

  • What’s With The Console Exclusives?. 2018-02-05 3:30 PM.
    • Discussion

    Last week we learned that Red Dead Redemption 2 will be delayed until October 26, 2018, and there is still no word on a PC version. (The first one was a console exclusive.) Red Dead Redemption 2 is Coming October 26th 2018: https://t.co/LLSkGYfJMP pic.twitter.com/fSu8k9qVZe — Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) February 1, 2018 I personally don’t care that much about RDR2, having never played or even seen the first one. I was more interested in the ensuing Twitter thread I got involved in about PC versus console games. I felt like I came across as one of those “oh no PC games are dead!” people so I figured I should elaborate a bit more here. (It’s almost impossible to say anything substantive on Twitter without being misinterpreted.) 1,485 words.

August, 2018

  • Blog Post Topic Ideas. 2018-08-02 7:00 PM.
    • Blog
    • Discussion

    I know bloggers are always in search of topics to write about, so I thought I would throw out some ideas here at the start of Blaugust. Then I noticed some others doing that. Then I noticed topic brainstorming is actually on the schedule for the first week. Reading comprehension, yay! Anyway a__lmost all of these are based on posts that are sitting in my Drafts folder unfinished right now. What do you use Twitter for? Is it a conversation platform? Is it a notification platform? Is it safe? How do you use retweets and favorites? 726 words.