Archive for November, 2007
« Previous EntriesHow Raiding Hurts WoW More Than It Helps
Friday, November 30th, 2007Let me say this up front: This isn’t an anti-raiding post. I think raids are fun. I’ve raided in a number of guilds across several games throughout my gaming career and it can be a great time. Raiding can be extremely satisfying, helpful for forming tight guild connections, and is a good way to really […]
Why I Don’t Buy Digital Downloads
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007There’s an interesting article over at MMOCrunch today. You can go read the article if you want the full story, but to make things short and easy, here’s what happened: Guy gets into IGN beta and agrees to NDA. Guy violates NDA. IGN removes beta access. That would be fine if this were the end […]
G4 Disses Every MMO To Come Out After WoW
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007In a recent article entitled Epic Fail: Gaming Failures, G4 discussed what it felt were the worst failures in the history of videogames. It’s got some good ones up there and I agree with most of them. But then, in the top slot (the number one biggest videogame failure of all time, mind you), G4 […]
“Fixing” EverQuest Classic
Saturday, November 24th, 2007Wilhelm2451 had a good post a while ago titled EverQuest and the Fall, which talks about how he perennially returns to an old favorite: EverQuest Classic. Love it or hate it, it’s impossible to deny that it’s had an enormous impact on MMOs and the MMORPG industry as a whole. But as Wilhelm found out, […]
No Country for Old Gamers?
Saturday, November 24th, 2007A few weeks ago I wrote a post about pulling community sites into the blogosphere and vice versa. Yesterday, the post was referenced at Elder Game, but not to discuss community– instead, Sandra examined the semantics of the word “hardcore.” While she brings up some interesting points about some people’s definition of the term (the […]
Life is Worth About Six Bucks When You Can’t Wait to Play Lineage
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007This news story makes me sick. It’s terrible.
Hanoi - Police in Vietnam have arrested a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering and robbing an 81-year-old woman for money to play online games, a police official said Tuesday. Dinh The Dan was arrested on Sunday at his home in Nam Dinh province, 80 kilometers south of […]
China Possibly Getting World of Warcraft as a Free-to-Play Game
Monday, November 19th, 2007I already reported on this over at Ten Ton Hammer, but in my morning news cruise I stumbled across an interesting article. Apparently Zhu Jun, CEO of The9 (the company handling the Chinese version of WoW) made some comments last week that seem to indicate they’re looking into a free-to-play model for WoW China.
“The9 is […]
World of Starcraft Thought
Friday, November 16th, 2007A clever man might look at Blizzard’s carefully dropped hints about their “next big MMOG,” the press hype build-up to Starcraft 2, the viral buzz about a Starcraft MMO, and the fact that Blizzard has 9 million hungry players of WoW (in addition to millions more Starcraft fans) that would be a perfect captive audience […]
The Word “Epic” is Overused
Friday, November 16th, 2007Random thought that occurred to me while posting news at TTH today: the word “epic” gets tossed around way too much by MMOG developers. Epic battles. Epic monsters. Epic weapons, armor, spells, item, potions, foozles, feezles, and fobbles. Every time someone is asked to talk about their new game or their next expansion or their […]
Solo? Group. Wait– Solo? Group. No, solo.
Friday, November 16th, 2007Tipa is irked by the zone design in many of the new zones in Rise of Kunark, and understandably so. What’s her beef?
The Fens, like the Kylong Plains, is covered with solo mobs. There are no mobs grouped with one another. There’s no heroic mobs. I’m not sure if even the nameds were heroic.
When EQ2 […]