Muckbeast

So I broke down and started playing a Facebook game recently. Not much has changed. The same lame tricks and the same lame forcing you to spam your friends into oblivion.
Please give this article a read, and let me know what you think.
Facebook Games: Where Monetization Gimicks and User Growth Matter More Than Good Game [...]

The upcoming release of Coin ‘n Carry is a huge milestone for my company, Frogdice. It is our first mass market game, our first social web game, and our first non-RPG. That’s a lot of firsts, but I’m just getting started.
It is the first game where I did not write a single line of code. [...]

That is the question asked by Wolfshead, and he answers it in the affirmative. He makes a number of excellent arguments in his long and detailed post. I will summarize a few of the more salient points, and give my own answer to this question after the jump:

In a comment to my Bill Roper – Computer Game Poison? article, BryanM passed along a link to a recent Gamasutra interview of Bill Roper. As always, it is interesting simply because of how disingenuous and dishonest (or at least in denial) this guy is.
And maybe, also at that time, that’s just to where the [...]

One of my writers created this really interesting article recently:
Five Revolutionary Games That Amazed Us
It got me thinking about revolutionary games that really made an impression on me both as a gamer and a developer.
1) Age of Empires: In many ways, this is the game that got me back into playing games after many years [...]

This is one of the most delicate things in game design. When is it ok to force players to do something they otherwise would not want to do? To what extent is it acceptable to do this, and to what extent is it not?
I am going to start with the premise that it is ok [...]

There are a lot of things in MMOs that players consider annoying that are important for immersion. Travel times. Regeneration times. Downtime in general. Etc.
But how do you strike a balance that maintains immersion without being needlessly annoying?

In a recent issue of PC Gamer, Desslock wrote a column wherein the salient point was we should appreciate the bad animations in Fallout: New Vegas because the developers instead spent that time working on the content. I think that is a point well taken – especially for RPGs.
Why then is this same attitude not [...]

This seems like a moderately huge disaster for Frogster, makers of Runes of Magic, a free to play MMO with ~4 million players.
The short version is this. Some group of people claim to have obtained the login details of just about the entire customer base of Frogster’s games (not just Runes of Magic). They have [...]

For a number of reasons, I will probably never play WoW again. I ended with Burning Crusade. But I still like to keep up with it, and hear about what has changed and what has not.
One of my writers recently wrote this article about the Carbonite Add On for WoW. The part that struck me [...]

The crowd control discussion led me to this question. Why is it so hard to balance melee vs. ranged in MMOs? In the last 10 years, it seems like ranged has had the clear and overwhelming advantage. It is almost always far more rewarding and enjoyable to play a ranged character in most MMOs. Melee [...]

I was reading a review of a game in PC Gamer and there was a comment that said something like “sadly, the game only supports LAN multiplayer.” I can understand the disappointment, but I also wished PC Gamer would express similar disappointment with games that ONLY support online multiplayer and no LAN multiplayer.
Starcraft II and [...]

Crowd Control… Stun, Mesmerize, Sleep, Knockdown, Knockup, Silence, Root, Hold, etc. What do you think of abilities/effects like these in games. And I mean both in the hands of players, mobs, and for PvE and/or PvP.
How are they used well?
How are they used poorly?
I have my own thoughts, and they are strong ones, but I’d [...]

In one fell swoop Penny Arcade (possibly not deliberately) took a swipe at both dumbed down MMOs and the excessive amount of quests and quest grinding in the modern MMO.

Wolfshead has two blog posts that really delve into this issue in great detail:
The Emasculation of MMOs: Part 1 – How Convenience Replaced Risk
The Emasculation of MMOs: Part 2 – Fun is for Children, Adventure is for Adults
Reading those posts, and the ones he links to from Keen’s blog, really made me miss some of [...]

One of my Bright Hub writers recently wrote a very interesting article: WoW Character History.
What was most interesting was the sheer wealth of information that is available to players about OTHER players. History of guilds joined and left, gear, last time logged on, and more. Upon reading this article, I was actually shocked and would [...]

This is a good issue that was raised on the Keen and Graev blog with their post: Guilds are simply too important.
I can definitely see where he is going with the argument, and I agree to a great extent.
There was a time on MMOs where a guild could be formed for any manner of reasons [...]

I have written about this topic many times before. The two biggest examples are:
Raiding Provides a False, Deceptive Sense of Real Accomplishment
Fed up! Raiding sucks as a sole form of end game content.
This would be a pretty dull post if all I was doing was encouraging you to go back and read those [...]

There are probably many other examples where the internet (or more specifically, the extreme easy access to virtually any information) has been detrimental to games and game design. I invite anyone to share their own examples. For purposes of this post, I am focusing on one.
In the 80s and early to mid 90s, there were [...]

Players often wonder how devs break things. They rant and rave and say things like “this worked yesterday, why can’t they just leave the things that work alone and work on new things instead.” What they don’t understand is that is a contradictory statement. I will give you a very simple example.
In Primordiax, I decided [...]