Muckbeast

This happens more often than I’d like, and it happened today. A player was doing a repeatable crafting task on Primordiax. He had to make 5 copper plates and then turn them into to Garen – an armorcrafter in Chemer. He has done the task before and it worked fine. But today after taking 3 [...]

Readers are always asking me to share some actual insight into the game development process. I always worry that it might be boring for people. I’ll give it a shot though:
Integers are great. For those of you not familiar with integers, they are basically positive or negative whole numbers: 1, 2, 3, -1, -2, -3, [...]

Permadeath was never a tremendously popular feature in MUDs, but it was common enough that it did have a certain following. Some players consider permadeath a vital component of roleplaying, and they feel it adds a significant amount of excitement and tension to a game.
I certainly understand why no commercial MMORPGs have experimented with the [...]

If you aren’t reading The Psychology of Video Games blog yet you are missing out. Between that site and a few other blog posts I’ve read recently (like Wolfshead’s lament about WoW’s Growing Immersion Deficit) I was motivated to write an article about designing group contest events in MMOs. This is just a small part [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One thing about Threshold I have always taken a lot of pride in is the fact that our population is almost an exact 50/50 split of men and women. I think this one fact has been vitally important to the strength of our community. This is incredibly common in the MMO industry, however:
“Currently, 64% of [...]

I always loved the idea of Guild Wars. I love their business model. I love so many of their game design concepts (full respec in town at will, great end game, many features designed to enhance community and social aspects, etc.). Unfortunately, when I played the game I just couldn’t get into it. The inability [...]

My wife and I played a lot of this back on the Gamecube, and years later we picked it up for the DS as well. We loved it in both incarnations. We keep meaning to pick it up for the Wii. Should we?
Benjamin Sell has been working on a ton of great guides for the [...]

CO might be a good game. You can read my Champions Online Preview here. But there is a serious problem, and it points to an even MORE serious problem.
Hyper customization is the primary USP (Unique Selling Point) of CO. There are no classes. There are just tons of powers to choose from. This is wonderful [...]

While often fodder for amusing videos and funny jokes, the way “noobs“ are derided in MMO culture is a very disturbing thing. While it is nothing new for insular hobbies or communities to be hesitant to embrace newcomers, MMO Elitism seems to take this to new levels. “Leet“ (or 3l33t, or elite) players take newbie [...]

MMOs are obviously multiplayer games. It even says so in the acronym! Despite this, good MMOs generally support solo play or small team play. Occasionally something comes along that forces large team grouping on people (like raiding), and people who prefer solo/small team play bristle against this. Invariably, pro-forced team fanboys (like the hard core [...]

This is sure to be controversial, but hopefully you will find the analysis and insights reasonably sound and share your own opinions.
What Went Wrong with Warhammer Online? A Postmortem.
The big question really is whether or not WAR can turn the ship around. Honestly, I am dubious at the moment. The next few months will really [...]

My wife and I interviewed our daughter about the Nintendo Wii, and then did a little experiment where we took her to Best Buy to pick the games that appealed to her most.  The results were, in my opinion, very interesting and could be valuable to any game developer who is going for the kid [...]

The arguments and analysis from this article will surely generate significant agreement and disagreement. I must admit that I found the points well made and well argued.
Why World of Warcraft is Badly Designed
I particularly agree with the sections on Quest Grinding (surprise, surprise), Time over Skill, terrible class balance, poor UI that relies too much [...]

The last blog post inspired some interesting thoughts and opinions. So I did a little surfing and found some interesting articles (with pictures of course) that touched on the issue as well.
Boobs Through the Years
Soul Calibur IV keeps laying on the sexuality
Soul Calibur IV gets boob job
This is a particularly interesting topic in light of [...]

Metaplace is the current project of highly regarded developer Raph Koster. In a nutshell, it is a community of user created worlds that can be social hangouts, games, “MMOs”, etc. Users have extensive tools to create their worlds. Adele Caelia wrote a good review of Metaplace on Bright Hub, if you need more details.
Have any [...]

My wife wrote an excellent guide to healing a few weeks ago and I forgot to bring it up for discussion! She plays the healer type character on every MMO or RPG we play. Over the years, she has definitely become a highly skilled expert on the subject (and play) of healers.
Check out her article: [...]