I really miss playing games that I can think about and invest time in. Sure, being immersed and entertained is a great thing, but somehow games these days don’t capture me like they used to. I remember coming up with new strategies for Colonization on the beach, spending large amounts of time reading through Magic […]

Tobold proposes an interesting thought experiment in his latest post as a type of litmus test to determine the quality of decision making in a game.  To quote: “If you slowed down the execution part of a game down by a factor of 10, would it still be fun?” He is right, of course, that […]

I’ve previously talked about the concept of leveling the abilities you use as you use them instead of the rather arbitrary experience points/level up systems that are out there. There is a huge load of issues with this concept and it is therefore not very surprising that its implementations are pretty much always flawed. One […]

One of my favourite (not) arguments against achievers is “They play the game to compensate for their lack of success in real life.” Statements like that can be read in many discussions and even blog posts and I always fail to grasp the argument behind it. Yes, I play games that include advancement because I […]

On Wednesday  the splitting of MMORPGs into various servers (“sharding”) and why it is done. In  – which nobody read, incidentally, go do it now – I pointed out reasons against sharding. Now, creating a single-server world for millions of people isn’t easy. Not only do people have different interests, as pointed out in part […]

In  I talked about the server structure in MMORPGs, why it exists and why it isn’t necessarily necessary anymore. Today, we’ll have a look at the question of why it would be good to get rid of isolated servers.

We have had cross-server battlegrounds and arenas in World of Warcraft for a long time, now we’re getting cross-server pick-up-groups for dungeons and raids. Games like Aion (and Tabula Rasa and I’m sure others) show us that you can subdivide the population of a region into different channels to make it less crowded while still […]

There’s been a lot of talk on the optimal difficulty level for raids, I even had my own post about it a few days ago. One argument on the pro-easy side is “everybody should be able to see the content.” I’ve countered this in the past with the question of why you would need to […]

Keen over at Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog wrote an interesting post on how current MMO design is too vertical. Content is bypassed quickly in order to get closer to the endgame. When is the last time you have actually cared about gear while levelling? A huge part of current MMOs is only there to […]

Much talk can be found on the blogosphere about the meaning (and lack thereof) of the words casual and hardcore. Euripedes of Critical QQ wants to abolish these terms altogether while Arioch over on Clearcasting proposes a scale of seriousness instead. There used to be a discussion over at WoWRadio that casual and hardcore don’t […]