Breaking News! (Not.) SOE is turning into Daybreak. I don’t read as much doom and gloom into this news as SynCaine does, but if Daybreak intends to take a more cross-platform stance, it could mean EverQuest Next will end up a lot more controller-friendly than we PC MMORPG gamers might like. You can already sense it with Landmark actually. You’ve got a left button ability and a right button ability and that’s about it. (565 words.)

I knew they’d be back. :) The web site isn’t live yet but it’s going in my feed reader the second it does. I was really honored to see my page mentioned on the last Massively post. Thanks guys! Reading over all of the finale posts on Massively this past week reminded me of something I forgot to mention in my earlier post, which was that all of the contributors are really top-notch writers, too. (143 words.)

ESO* is going Buy-to-Play. Yay! I’m looking forward to playing it again. (Holy jeez those guys make awesome cinematics. I wonder how much of a AAA studio’s game development budget goes into those.) But philosophically speaking, I wonder what the Buy-to-Play model says about an MMO. After having experienced it in GW2, B2P seems to imply something that’s not a very good thing. The game company seems to be saying, “Here’s our persistent world game, but there’s really only about a month or two of fresh gameplay for you to look at, and we’re probably not going to update it very much, so don’t make any long-term plans to stay in our game.” (499 words.)

So yeah, there was a post recently in the MMO blogosphere that basically trashed Massively. I guess they’re entitled to their opinion, but it didn’t make any sense to me. I liked Massively for the exact reason that this other blog trashed them: They didn’t take themselves too seriously. I always felt like there were human beings behind their articles and podcasts. Real people doing the best they could with clearly limited resources in a super fast-paced environment. (1149 words.)

This is unrelated to MMOs (sort of ), but I’ve been on a Quake CTF nostalgia trip for a while, so I went looking for a modern AAA shooter that would provide the same sort of team-based competitive spirit. I don’t know if such a game still exists, but my first candidate for testing was Planetside 2, a game which I haven’t played before. (Well, that’s not entirely true-I installed it sometime around when it first came out, played it for about 30 seconds-enough to see myself airdropped into a chaotic mess-and then decided it wasn’t for me. I don’t remember it launching with the tutorial it has now and I had no clue how to play it.) I suppose technically PS2 is an MMO, but I think of it as a shooter because there is no PvE element. (2053 words.)

If this rumor that AOL is going to shut down Joystiq-and by extension Massively-is true, then I’d just like to say that AOL sucks. Massively is basically the only gaming news site that I read, and their podcast is one of the few that gets a regular weekly listen from me on my morning commute. I hope everyone at Massively and Joystiq lands on their feet. (66 words.)

I found an old, old screenshot of my main Asheron’s Call character from near the end of my playing time: What MMORPGs looked like when they were more work than fun. There’s some interesting things to note there. First of all, my /played time was 17d 11h 26m 22s. I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing that game… it seemed like my entire life was spent in that game for about a year. (I was playing AC when everyone else was playing EverQuest.) Yet I only reached level 35. In AC, your character “level” wasn’t much except a measurement of how much you had played-your power level came from your skills. Level 35 seemed like an impossibly high number to me back then. I knew people in their 40s and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could get there without giving up sleep entirely. (402 words.)

Ruh roh. No more soup for you. Or land. I logged in quickly to see what, if anything, changed. The only immediate change I noticed was that my Labor Points plummeted from 5000 to 1000. My house and land are still mine, but they are only “protected” until the 28th, after which I believe they will decay in a week. I went to the web site to see how much it would cost to resume my Patron benefits, and realized I had never redeemed my Patron Compensation thingy, so I went ahead and did that to extend my time another 5 days. For no particular reason. (271 words.)

I’m in a “bouncing around between games” mode at the moment, now that I’m done with Elite: Dangerous. I’ve been logging into two or three or four different MMOs a day, looking for one to capture my imagination. Level 100! WoW. My WoW subscription runs out on the 20th, and I won’t be renewing. WoW is a fun game, but I always tire of it pretty quickly. I did manage to reach level 100 with my Hunter and upgrade my Garrison, though. I have enjoyed my time in the game, but I simply can’t comprehend how people think the story in this expansion is the best ever. I guess I’ve never “gotten” the lore in WoW. (WoW might be the only game that I care less about the quest text than ArcheAge.) I thought there was supposed to be time travel in here somewhere but at no point do I remember anyone saying that I traveled back in time. (Except one quest to kill Banthar in Nagrand that sort-of referred to it, some five zones into the game.) There are Russian space goats and angry orcs everywhere, but then I was in a place with a bunch of bird people and giant crow gods or something. *shrug* I feel bad for people who will feel obligated to spend the next two years playing this expansion until the next one comes out. It’s okay to play other games, guys. You really don’t have to live in one game your whole life. :) (1043 words.)

This is probably a dumb question, but if these Airdrops are such a fun element of the game that everyone enjoys, why aren’t they building it into the game as random spawns like Trion’s Rifts and Arcfalls? Why would they make someone pay to spawn a fun event for everyone? That makes no sense. It’s like making people buy world boss spawns. (Don’t get any ideas, game developers. That would be terrible.) (193 words.)