I was reading a post on Why I Game which talked about lackluster enthusiasm for GW2, and I started to feel really bad for him. I cannot imagine what it’s like to feel such a compulsion to obtain achievements that you’re willing to log tons of game time doing things that aren’t fun. I certainly agree about the lack of enthusiasm for GW2. This Tower of Nightmares update is more of the same.

Lots of talk about achievements. Are they good? Are they bad? MMO Gypsy hates them (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RagingMonkeys/~3/UCUa6ra8IUg/achievement-hate-exploration-and-mystery.html), Herding Cats defends them (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/machiavelliscat/xgUW/~3/EBQ0bOGdQLk/), and CuppyVille relies on them (http://cuppyville.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/in-which-i-defend-achievements-in-mmos/). Me? I tend to ignore them. It’s true that I’m an Explorer on the Bartle test, so you might think I’d be siding with Syp in saying that achievements have destroyed the MMO genre. Well, first of all, I don’t think the genre has been destroyed at all; I think it’s far better now than it’s ever been.

I know that the Mithril Coins are just a way to force people to buy from the shop, but I still cheerfully bought a big bagful of them. Being able to zip back to quest givers is an incredible time-saver. Way more worth real money than, say, a fancy cape or horse or whatever. (Actually, I had a trove of Turbine Points sitting around so I didn’t need to spend any (more) real money.

I was in a dungeon recently with a chain-pulling tank, and it got me thinking. I’ve always associated the chain-pulling tank behavior with a more advanced tanking technique, but is it really harder to chain-pull? Chain-pulling, if you don’t know, is where the tank runs at full speed pulling mob after mob after mob without stopping, until he gathers a big group of them together, and then he takes off again before the group is even dead.

Just so you know, I have been a veritable pinball of MMO playing lately. First FFXIV leveling an Archer/Bard to level 30. Then WoW leveling a Mage from around 17 to 50, and leveling some other characters. Then GW2 to check out the Tower of Nightmares. Then LoTRO leveling my hobbit Hunter from 38 to 45. Then Rift to check out the Song of Dreams patch. Even a little bit of Neverwinter and TERA and (gasp) Aion thrown in there between.

The Burning Crusade has been out since January 2007, which makes it nearly seven years old. Since that time, there has always been a contingient of people on every new MMO forum who scream, “Where are the flying mounts? I keep getting hit by mobs!” I, like most everyone else, always scoffed and thought, “Just run around the mobs. Jeez. We don’t need no stinkin’ flying mounts.” Flash forward to today, when my Hunter finally bought a flying mount on the Hellfire Penninsula.

There is one area where WoW is woefully far behind other games like Rift and FFXIV. That is: Normal dungeon guides on YouTube. Good ones, I mean. They don’t exist for WoW. Or maybe they do exist, but they are so deeply buried within the noise that you can’t find them. I don’t want to see some guy rambling about nothing for twenty minutes of unedited game footage. I want a little intro telling me what the trash mobs are, then I want to see the first boss and his special mechanics, then the second boss, and so on.

It took me a while, but I finally found the new content for Song of Dreams. Looking at the map around Ember Isle, I noticed there was a shaded area off to the west of the island that looked new, so I started running that way and found a little island at the extreme western edge with new stuff! (If you think Ember Isle looks like a reverse Pac Man like I do, it’s in the mouth.

This isn’t MMO related, but here’s a couple cents on the new consoles. I have a PS3 Slim so I don’t expect I’ll be getting a PS4 until developers stop making games for the PS3. However, since I’ve never owned an Xbox, I will probably get an Xbox One in the somewhat near future, possibly after Christmas, at which time I will also have to get a TV to connect it to.

Oh hey, according to the mid-season WvW report, Blackgate is winning. Go Blackgate! When I randomly chose Blackgate to play on, I picked a winner! (Actually it wasn’t random. It was a choice between Blackgate which was the “coolest” sounding server, or Yak’s Bend which was the “funniest” sounding server, and in the end I went for coolness.) My only contribution to the war effort was capturing one empty Ruins and escorting one yak.

Here are some first impressions of the newly announced WoW expansion Warlords of Draenor. I’m not a hardcore WoW player but recently I’ve been playing more than I usually do, so I have more of an opinion than “meh, whatever.” New Character Models. It’s about time, I say. I can’t believe anyone would oppose this. I found it rather annoying that they made these nice, smooth panda models and animations for MoP but left everybody else with like fourty-seven triangles and six frames of movement.

I’m trying to wrap my head around this EQ Next/Landmark thing. If I’m understanding this correctly, what we’re buying in Landmark is the toolset that a game developer would use to create an MMO game world. SOE must have looked at their tools and said, “You know, these tools are so fun and intuitive to use, maybe we could polish them up a bit and sell them, because people really seem to like building virtual things.

I think it’s safe to say this: I got an invitation for this weekend’s TESO beta test. I assume it’s okay to say that because they made a big public announcement that they were sending out the invitations. I had to accept a rather harsh-sounding NDA though so I don’t think I’ll be able to say much of anything else. Beta testing is a delicate balance. On the one hand, it’s super exciting to see a new shiney and possibly shape the course of its future (though to be honest, in my experience, beta reports are largely ignored unless it is a game-breaking bug), but on the other hand, you don’t want to play so much that you burn out before the game even launches.

Trion Worlds is working on something called Trove. Now when Trion does something, I tend to take notice, because Rift is hands down the best themepark MMO out there right now. Any arguments you might have against my statement are invalid, because I said so. (Defiance, on the other hand, was a bit meh.) I anxiously looked at the screenshots for Trove and … drooped with disappointment. Really? 8-bit crap graphics?

We all know that blockbuster MMOs EQ Next/Landmark (the minecraft one), WildStar (the cartoon one), and The Elder Scrolls Online (the D&D one) are “coming soon.” But a while back some posts I saw about a Korean-made MMO called Black Desert caught my eye. I hadn’t heard of it before, so I did some investigation. ( That means I went to Wikipedia .) Wikipedia says it’s a “sandbox-oriented” MMO, but I’m not entirely sure what that means.

With the announcement of Warlords of Draenor, there was a bit of buzz around the MMO-sphere about the role of the leveling process. I was struck by a post on Healing the Masses suggesting that it’s time to remove the leveling game entirely from MMOs so that we no longer segregate the players into groups that can’t play together. … an ideology that is slowly dying, an ideology that never really belonged much in the first place in this genre.

After a patching process that seemed to take hours (possibly because I was playing another game while I waited), I spent a couple of minutes in LotRO to see the class changes in Helm’s Deep. (I am only 45 so I am nowhere near seeing the content of Helm’s Deep.) It looks like all they did was integrate industry-standard “skill trees” into the game, so you have to choose one of three specializations for your character.

I thought it would be fun to write a series of posts talking about where my characters are in various games. Lately I have been bouncing back and forth between MMOs, so I’ve touched base with a lot of them recently. At the time of this writing, my main character in EQ2 is a level 43 Wood Elf Warden (one of the many classes of healer, if you don’t know). After a recent spate of playing, he moved from the clockwork-kobold-infested Steamfont Mountains to the icy island of Everfrost.

I realize nobody wants to read about WoW, but historically I haven’t played it much, and about 90% of it is still new to me. Well “new” isn’t the right word exactly-it’s more that WoW’s implementation of familiar MMO tropes is new to me. For example, I’ve made a shocking observation in my low to mid-range dungeon runs: The tank almost always does the most damage in the group. Sometimes by a very large margin.

I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that I love(d?) about Rift, and I think I figured it out. It was perfect for an introvert like me who enjoys solo play, but also wants to do group activities without a lot of hassle. Rift’s dynamic rifts and zone events fulfilled that requirement perfectly. You’re out doing quests to level your character, enjoying the scenery. Then a zone event breaks out, and you rush to the spot marked on your map and find a big group of players there.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! No posts until Monday. Have a great weekend!

Has anyone seen Wizardry Online? It’s free-to-play, and another one of those hardcore old school MMORPGs that SOE seems to like. It’s clearly Asian in origin, but it’s weird because it’s an Asian vision of standard European medieval tropes like elves and dwarves. The graphics are odd as well. It looks a bit like everything is a low-contrast sepia-toned image. WO seems to be one of the “hard” MMOs that everyone clamors for (but never actually plays).

When I last left LotRO (Lord of the Rings Online) a couple of years ago, my highest level character was only a level 38 Hunter. I stopped playing largely because of this one Epic quest that kept defeating me, and nothing will drive me away from a game faster than a required quest that keeps killing me and/or requires a group. I discussed that quest in another post. When I came back this time, I got past that quest, so progression could resume.

In playing Aion again, I made a shocking* discovery: It’s open world PvP! I had no idea. I always thought the PvP was voluntary. But nope, I found out the hard way when I was out in Morheim. I got killed by some guy on a skateboard in like four shots. I didn’t even realize it was another player until I was almost dead. Well that sure puts a new spin on things.

One night I didn’t feel like playing an MMO. It happened to be a night where there was a Steam sale on Stanley’s Parable, a game I’ve heard a lot about, so I got that and played it. First of all, it’s not a game. There needs to be another category for this kind of thing. Something like Interactive Art Project or Interactive Entertainment. (It’s similar to Gone Home in that regard.