Just like everyone else I spent my weekend playing in the Star Wars: The Old Republic Beta. Or well, the part of my weekend that I could reasonably spend on gaming anyway. Time enough, it turns out, to get a Jedi Sentinel to level 18 and not much else. Unlike so many of you, I […]

So you get Diablo III for free when you subscribe to World of Warcraft for a full year. Not a big deal really. Few people will take it and of those, at least half (probably more) will regret it because they won’t be playing WoW for remotely that long. A minority will save a little […]

You’ve probably heard about Glitch, the new bloodless MMO by tiny speck. It features a complex crafting system, all kinds of skill specializations and, most importantly, some very weird humor. I’ll admit, I had a laugh when I was first tasked with milking a butterfly, a task that required me to massage (with lotion!) said […]

I was when I first encountered it. Things have not improved since. For one, I can’t throw a stone in Moria without hitting an orc that’s carrying a legendary item for me to pick up. (Once I’ve dealt with the angry mob of course. For some reason, throwing stones in Moria or even jumping into […]

The title of this post is full of lies. There are still people who play in groups in MMOs and I don’t really know the reasons as to why the others don’t anymore. What I do know is why I rarely play in a group these days if it isn’t a group of friends. My […]

I’m deliberately choosing not to engage in the whole difficulty debate. I enjoy difficult games (and will still play MMOs, Spinks!) up to a point and I don’t like much of what has been done in that regard in recent MMOs. That’s all I’ll say about the topic, check all those other awesome bloggers for […]

The other day I got a funky quest reward in Lord of the Rings online: A one-time use item that can be used to snare a monster (supposedly for easy killing.) I don’t know if these are commonly available elsewhere, but I’ve only seen this one so far and find it both curious and problematic.

Collecting sets of items has a certain undeniable appeal to gamers. Whether you are collecting artifacts in Rift or trying to complete the latest tier set in WoW, there is a compelling quality to the system that makes you want to keep collecting. This is good in so far as it keeps players interested in […]

The traditional (by now) questing model in MMOs doesn’t leave a lot of room for exploration and surprises. Things get even worse when players (like me) decide not to read quest text and blindly follow the pointers of some built-in quest helper system. The other day, LotRO surprised me when I encountered a line of […]

Klepsacovic demands numbers and I’ll absolutely second that motion. It is rare for MMO companies to even give us something as simple as subscriber numbers, let alone detailed statistics on player behavior. Some of that could be derived from games like World of Warcraft through the use of mods or parsing the armory at least, […]