There are thousands of bloggers out there writing about WoW and other MMORPGs, every day - useful stuff, interesting stuff, thought-provoking stuff. You probably know of a few of the best-known bloggers - but did you know that's just the tip of the iceberg?

But who has the time to read all those blogs? Well, we do. Every day, we scour the MMO blogosphere for the most interesting, most useful and most thought-provoking posts, and present them all here for you to read - nothing but the best.

What Is Lag?

by on April 30, 2013


“I’ve got lag!” We all hate it, we all hate to say it – but do we understand it?

Maverick indie MMO designer Eric at Elder Game has been hearing that phrase from his players a lot lately – so this week, he’s put together a fascinating Field Guide To The Lag Monster. It’s aimed at his own game, obviously, but much of it’s equally applicable to any other MMO.

From CDN Lag to Graphics Lag to Chat Lag, if you ever wanted to know more about the beast that ruins your MMOs from time to time – or just wanted another peek inside the complexity of running and MMO – read on!

“Monster Lag

Symptoms: You can pick stuff up off the ground just fine, and talk to NPCs, but when you try to fight a monster, they react sluggishly — possibly taking two or three hits to the face before they fight back. Your knockback attacks may also take a second before the monster starts flying backwards.

Cause: This happens because the physics sub-server gets bogged down. Each “zone” of the world has a program that makes the monsters fight and makes NPCs move around. If they get bogged down, things can’t move or fight well.

This is happening more than I like right now because I don’t have enough computers to run all the physics sub-servers, so they can get starved for CPU. I’ve ordered new hardware to fix this soon.”*

Read the rest of What Is Lag

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Should You Ever Play Neverwinter?

by on April 29, 2013


The latest contender on the ever-more-crowded fantasy MMORPG block is out – Neverwinter, based on 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons and from “Star Trek Online” developers Cryptic.

It’s another Free To Play MMO – but that doesn’t mean the time you’d spend on it is worthless. So, is it worth spending that time?

Apparently, yes.

  • Chris at Level Capped writes a favourable impressions post, saying that he can’t think of a reason not to play it – “. It’s free. It’s got decades of IP behind it. It’s social (if you like that), and Cryptic does a stellar job of letting you know that you don’t need to follow the Golden Path every single time you log in.”
  • Aggronaut finds it very entertaining, even if it isn’t going to set the world on fire – “For me it fills the same place that Guild Wars 2 does. It will never be my primary MMO, but it is a fun change from one of the more traditional experiences. “
  • And MMO Gamer Chick wasn’t expecting to find it very fun, but has been surprised both by her and her husband’s reaction to it – ” Every hour, I still get surprised when I stumble across new game mechanics or systems that I didn’t know existed, while continuing to be impressed by how much is already in place. “

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Will Camelot Unchained Come To Pass? And If Not, Why Not?

by on April 25, 2013


Kickstarter has launched a bunch of exciting new MMO experiments, from Pathfinder to Richard Garriott’s new project.

But one of the most talked-about Kickstarter projects so far, Camelot Unchained, is still short of its targets – and may never meet them.

Spinks takes an insightful look at the way that the Camelot Unchained campaign has gone so far, what they have promised, and why things haven’t gone as well as hoped:

“He had a very strong focus on how fun it will be to make your enemy suffer, watch your enemy suffer, lay traps and inhabit monsters to inflict misery on your opponent. ie. Have fun griefing the dungeon!

Now while there are plenty of players who will enjoy that, it is a sideshow. The main appeal for players in a permaworld with PvP is the opportunity to BUILD, not just to destroy. People want to know they can hold territory with their guild, stamp their authority on the landscape of the game, invest time and effort to be a part of the story of that gameworld that will go down in gamer history.

EVE gets this right. CU does not. Sure, “haha, that dude fell in the lava trap!” is good for a laugh in a Dungeon Keeper kind of way, but it isn’t the draw that being able to stake out your claim to a part of the world and defend it will be.”

Read the rest of Camelot, ’tis a silly place…

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Making MMOs Socially Sticky

by on April 23, 2013


Between the birth of the modern MMO and now, the trend has been toward increasing accessibility, increased convenience and less time commitment. But, as many people have said, that comes at the cost of a social fabric in modern MMOs.

At the same time, most people believe that it’s now impossible to go back – that MMO audiences simply wouldn’t tolerate the forced grouping and slow pace of yesteryear.

Psychochild wrote a fascinating blog post this weekend exploring this problem, and looking at ways that we could go forward, not back, whilst at the same time growing the social experience of the MMORPG once again:

“The biggest challenge here will be to convince players that this is in their best interests. As I said above, the problems of social overhead have lead people to believe that social interaction takes too much time. I think this is backwards, though; the social connections in MMOs meant the players often chose to spend more time in the game because they enjoyed it. As far as I know, the most active players are still playing as many hours per week as before, just that they aren’t staying as long in a particular game.

The other issue is that WoW was the first game for a lot of people. These players might not see the advantage that a focus on grouping confers. They got into WoW’s social fabric just fine, thanks, not realizing that the elements they loved in WoW can’t easily be duplicated in other games. Convincing people who were new to MMOs with WoW might require a different approach.

I think a good way to accomplish this is to purposefully have a more niche focus. For example, I think Camelot Unchained will do eventually very well because it is focused on an team vs. team niche, like GW2′s WvW gameplay. It won’t attract the breadth of players, but those who do play will find it easier to group together to fight the enemy. A more niche game will mean people will run into the same other people. I predict that the game will not be plagued with “MMO Tourists” like other games have been.”

Read the rest of M is for Multiplayer

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Game Report Roundup

by on April 22, 2013


Interested in trying out a new MMO? As usual, there are more options out there than anyone could have time to explore.

Here are the latest batch of reports from brave pioneers venturing into the latest, greatest, or just strangest options available in the MMOSphere…

  • Healing The Masses has been checking out Darkfall, and so far feels it has good ideas, but awful execution – “This is puzzling though as this isn’t their first rodeo, they have developed and run a game,the same game previously so I just can’t understand why this version is still so lacking.”
  • Ardwulf has been taking a look at Age Of Wushu, finding it very promising if not terribly accessible – ” it is very significantly different from the western MMO play experience, both because it is an unconventional sandbox and because it’s from offshore”
  • The guys at Massively played the uber-sexist MMO Scarlet Blade so we don’t have to – “Heck, if you really want to see your women objectified, you can play TERA for the same price of entry. At least the combat there is good.”
  • And Imperial Intelligence’s Targeter questions why he, a SWTOR blogger, isn’t very thrilled by the new SWTOR planet – “I miss the galaxy-hopping. I miss the planets I visited, adventured on, and left a conquering hero (or villainous bastard).”

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Back To The Noob State

by on April 19, 2013


We finish off the week with a short, fun, interesting piece from Bravetank, as she delves once again into the cold, unforgiving space of EVE Online.

Ever wondered what might possess someone to jump into something that’s famously one of the least friendly and least forgiving game environments available? Well, Bravetank’s not only done it once – she did it once, and now she’s gotten the craving to do it again…

“So I picked up a Level 1 Distribution mission from a Duvolle Lab agent. It all looked straight forward, but the mission details did say I would be passing through a low sec area if I used the automatic route. Ok I thought, never seen that before, but surely they wouldn’t really put me in danger for a Level 1 mission, would they? Surely it’s just an overly dramatic piece of text to give the mission some edge. Of course. That’s what it is.

So I accepted the mission, set destination, undocked & went on Automatic pilot, and picked up my book to read while I traveled through LOW SEC space.

Yes there are names for people like me. Don’t put them in the comments. You’ll hurt my feelings.”

Read the rest of EVE And The Pre-Noob State

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Is There An “Average” Player?

by on April 18, 2013


How do you design for a massive game like WoW?

The most obvious approach would be to tailor your content toward the average player.

But who exactly is that?

Today we’ve got two posts looking at just that question. Firstly, Tobold takes on the perennial “hardcore vs casual” debate with some Real World Statistics:

“The Central Limit Theorem says that if you make for example this plot of video game skill of a large enough population, what you will get is a bell curve with a single hump in the middle. That is why this curve is called a “normal distribution”. The nature of this curve is that 68% of people are withing one standard deviation of the average. For example 68% of people have an IQ between 85 and 115, and are thus of average intelligence. Of course people are notoriously bad at estimating their own IQ or other qualities, so that if you rely on self-assessment you end up with the observation that most people are above average, which is a mathematical impossibility.”

Read the rest of Most People Are Average…

And in other news – and this one’s particularly fascinating – Balkoth has taken things a stage further, and actually conducted his own statistical experiment to determine if there is an “average” value for willingness to grind, in particular. He set up polls, collected data, visualised it, then analysed the results:

“And then, of course, 13% think you’d be justified in grinding out 5000+ Mogu (at four Mogu a minute, that’s 20+ hours of grinding total).

No wonder we have so many complaints and arguments on the forums (in terms of actual complaints and not trolling) – if Blizzard puts in ring that requires you to kill 500 Mogu, half the population of those that responded to this poll thinks you’d be crazy to get the ring and half the population thinks you’d be equally crazy NOT to get the ring! The first group can’t understand why the latter group feels compelled and forced to grind out the Mogu and the latter group can’t understand why the first group thinks it’s even a valid choice whether to get the ring.”

Read the rest of I Have Discovered the Source of Forum Complaining in Mists!…

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Two Views On The “Ghetto” Of LFR

by on April 17, 2013


Love it or hate it (and I think regular readers know my opinion by now), WoW’s LFR continues to be one of the most debate-worthy and interesting experiments in the MMO world at the moment.

Today we’ve got two really interesting, rather opposed views on the entire thing. First, we have Dinear at Forever A Noob, who has been looking at the progression of raiding groups on his server, and has come to a somewhat startling conclusion – that LFR is slowly and patiently strangling World of Warcraft:

“Guilds (at least on my realm) aren’t really doing progression raids anymore. Since raiding is such a large part of the game, I can’t imagine that people aren’t raiding. The obvious conclusion is that people are getting their raiding fix through LFR, and not so much in guild raids.

I have a problem with this.

In my personal vision of WoW, guilds and interpersonal interaction are the heart and soul of the game. The need for cooperation to overcome obstacles is what the original raid encounters were built on. Communication, people doing their job, everyone having a role… these were the skills that set the foundation for the more fun and challenging raid bosses. LFR doesn’t have much or any of that.”

Read the rest of My Opinion: LFR Is Ruining The Game…

Meanwhile, The Godmother presents a completely different opinion, from the perspective of someone who isn’t able to compete in normal raids, and so has to rely on LFR to see all the content. She describes the experience as being “in the ghetto of WoW”:

“LFR is, for some of us, the ONLY way to see Blizzard’s End Game content. As a result, the patience to remain in the system is likely to last at least until Garrosh meets his (wholly justified) unpleasant end. It doesn’t matter how many helpful buffs you chuck at people, if the people playing aren’t there to do their best, there is absolutely nothing you can do. All you can hope is that everyone turns up and at least makes an effort, and if they do you’ll wonder why you ever bemoaned LFR’s system in the first place.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that’s really enough. ”

Read the rest of In The Ghetto

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How The MMO Sausage Is Made – fascinating Gorgon insights

by on April 16, 2013


Eric Heimburg’s Project Gorgon is absolutely fascinating, and I make no apology for featuring it as often as I do.

He’s trying to do the impossible – create an independent, full-featured, 3D MMORPG that’s (in some senses at least) competitive with the best of the genre. And as he does so, he’s blogging the entire process, and has been doing so for years now.

Today he’s got another massive update post, and whilst it doesn’t focus on any single aspect of his task, it’s a really, really interesting insight into all the thousands of details, skillsets and tasks he has to get right to make this enormous undertaking bear fruit.

“After talking with some players, I’ve decided that there really needs to be some better hints to the content. I mean, it’s an exploration game, and I want you to just go poking around and find cool stuff. But a lot of people have been aggressively trained not to do this by other games in the MMO genre.

So I’m implementing the “Stuff To Do List” real quick. Basically it’s just a check-list of stuff to find in the first couple of zones. It’s not a complete list, but enough to hopefully teach players that there’s tons more stuff out there.

The danger is that once they complete that list, they’ll assume they’ve done everything and quit. So do I keep making more checklists? I guess that’s reasonable. The later ones will be kind of vague, just so you know there’s stuff out there.

But I still don’t want to put everything in a list… so I need more advanced ways to convey that there’s lots of stuff out there for you to find.”

Read the rest of Gorgon Grab-Bag Update

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Why MMOs Shouldn’t Tell Stories

by on April 15, 2013


Ah, the story of our favourite MMO. That’s why we play, right? To learn what happens to our favourite heroes, villains, and…

Wait, what? No?

MMOs appear to have disappeared down a “story” rabbit-hole as of 2013. From the increasing linearity of much of WoW to Guild Wars 2′s “All Trahearne, all the time” plotline, game developers appear to be convinced that what we want is to play alongside a classic fantasy epic.

As you may have guessed by now, I’m not really of that opinion. And neither, it turns out, is Syl, who writes a fantastic piece at her new site, MMO Gypsy, pointing out just why the “big plot” push of the last few years just doesn’t seem satisfying to many people:

“I honestly think the constant demand for increased “story telling” in MMORPGs is mislead. The so-called fourth pillar of game design is overrated for this genre in particular, for should not the player drive the narrative rather than being driven by it? And it would be a good thing to remember how great stories are really created and why more and more story-driven quests and events in MMOs are in fact counter-productive to the immersive experience. Worlds are immersive when they engage us and make us partake – not listen to.

Great writing is the art of not saying things. It’s the skill of knowing which things to write and which to leave out. The greatest of authors understand that it won’t do to spell out all the details, secrets and twists about a story; this is not how interesting characters or plot are created. I believe typically most writers spend the first half of their journey learning to flesh out, formulate and construct interesting, complex plot-lines. After that, they spend the other half of the time removing information and un-saying too many words. I can confirm this for my own writing journey, that it’s a struggle of learning what not to say, rather than what to say and mustering that “courage for silence” which tangentially, is also a central theme in the education of teachers (which happens to be my professional background). Didactics 101 will teach you that for greatest learning effect, impact and longevity, your audience needs to make as many steps of the journey on their own as possible. They must try unearth and unravel the story (or learning subject) by themselves. The teacher should only ever be the prompter, the one asking questions and if required the fallback plan.”

Read the rest of Why Storytelling In MMORPGs Is Overrated…

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