Muckbeast

I am going to try not to get too esoteric or philosophical. Lets eschew things like success as defined by making people happy, bettering the world, adding good ideas/concepts to the game design space, or all sorts of totally unmeasurable things like that. For the purposes of this discussion, lets focus a little more on [...]

I read this signature file on an MMO forum today: “Remember, in MMO’s whoever achieved more than you is a nolifer, whoever achieved less than you is a noob.”
I chuckled at first, but it is sad how true that mentality is.
What do you think causes this?

… while counting their money?
I don’t expect every, or any, MMO to be a WoW killer. But it strikes me as a pretty dang sad indictment of the genre that time after time, big budget, major publisher MMOs come out and fail miserably.
Read on for examples that include Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and Champions [...]

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while. This article at MMORPG is the final push over the edge.
Most MMOs have gone with the shard/server approach. Each copy of the game has a distinct community. You make characters on a specific server, and the character can only be played on that server. Each [...]

The ugly way Roper drove Hellgate: London and Flagship into bankruptcy is legendary. The greedy subscription model for an action RPG Diablo clone was an exceptionally bad idea. His constant arguing and fighting against respecs was rancid icing on the rotten cake.
In light of that, it was a real head scratcher when Cryptic hired him [...]

Intereting article on Gamasutra today: Opinion: If You’re Not Having Fun, Play Something Else
The part that really resonated with me:
Instead of thinking “core versus casual,” we’d be served to look at things like complexity, challenge, difficulty and tedium as components of specific genres, rather than universal concepts that must be reduced across the board for [...]

Wolfshead has started a really great discussion on his blog: Waiting for the Next MMO Revolution
The reason why I’m in a perpetual state of angst is that I feel that the MMO industry has squandered all of the great potential that was evident a scant 10 years ago during the first MMO revolution heralded by [...]

I want to revisit a favorite issue of mine. New Grind, Just like the Old Grind: Quest Heavy Advancement.
When people read that article, they often get the wrong idea. I don’t hate quests (or missions). I don’t think a 100% mob grinding game is the way to go. What I hate is when a game [...]

By now, many of you have read my article What Went Wrong with Warhammer Online? Is it a failure? Since I wrote the article, new leadership really has not done much to address those issues. In a recent interview, the head dev. of Warhammer put the blame for WAR’s problems on the game being too [...]

This story is amusing at first: Amazon Coughs Up $150K for Lost Homework
But when I think about it in more detail, it starts to make me nervous.
How much is someone’s MMO character worth? What if a character is lost and:

Cannot be restored.
The backup lacks expensive, virtual items.
The account is banned – wrongfully in the customer’s [...]

According to an article on Gamasutra (Analysis: Why EA Isn’t An Acquisition Target (For Now)) this is not going to happen, but it raises two interesting questions.
1) Would a Microsoft buyout of EA be good for the industry?
2) Would a Microsoft buyout of EA be good for gamers?
My answer is no to both, but I [...]