After reading over this article on Massively by Anatoli Ingram, I am stunned that the author can even remember the names of those four GW2 Living Story characters, let alone come up with a thousand words of an article analyzing their personalities and backstories. My experience of the last year of Living Story was something like this: Oh there’s this cool new Living Story! Oh there’s nothing to actually do, but I got some achievements.

Continuing my adventures in finding an MMO to get hooked on before the new ones come out in 2014, I turned to venerable EVE, the best-or at least the most popular-game I’ve never paid for. With reckless abandon, I bought 3 months of time and downloaded the client. I haven’t played EVE in five years, when I played for a week or so during a free trial. Surprisingly, my character from the free trial was still there.

I recently reformatted my PC and reinstalled Windows 7, so of course I had to re-install all my games. But instead of re-installing the seemingly hundreds of MMOs I previously had, I decided to limit the number of MMOs installed so I could try to cut down on this MMO ADD I’ve been experiencing. So far I’ve installed WoW, FFXIV, LotRO, SWTOR, EVE, and Mortal Online. (Well, and Steam, obviously.) By sheer coincidence, I happened to have active subscriptions for those games as well (except MO).

I’ve been “into” Massively.com a lot lately, listening to their podcasts and watching their streams, and one thing I’ve noticed is that some of them have a total love affair with Star Wars: Galaxies. They talk about SWG like most other people talk about Everquest 1: They diefy it like it’s the greatest thing there ever was or ever will be. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that not only did I never play or even see it, I never even knew it was an MMORPG.

Remember the good old days when you could buy tons of awesome AAA games from Steam for ridiculously low prices? Yeah, I think those days are over. I was pretty disappointed in the Fall and Winter Steam Sales this time around. Almost all of the AAA games I saw on deep discount sales ($10 or less) were ones that I had already bought in earlier sales. (I still haven’t played 90% of them.

This is it. It’s all or nothing. My marmot is almost out of health. He won’t survive another round, and he’s the last one. I throw the box. I watch with breath caught in my throat as it teeters … totters … and falls down on the frog. I got it! I pump my fist and celebrate the capture of a new battle pet in WoW. My gnome jumps for joy on the screen, too.

Yeah, so we’ve been waiting for Everquest Next Landmark, right? We all thought they would start in January, right? We all bought an alpha or beta package even though we don’t want to admit it because it’s stupid to buy beta access for a free game, right? So what do you think goes through my mind when I get an email with a subject that looks like this: Ultrviolet, you’re invited to play EverQuest Next Landmark!

There are a lot more “early access” games now than ever before, thanks to Steam and Kickstarter. Basically what this means is that some random, poor game developer can release what amounts to a semi-playable demo of their game and then ask people to buy it for a (surprisingly minor) discount, hoping that they’ll raise enough money and interest to fund the rest of the game development. In a lot of cases that is as janky as it sounds, because some Steam developers think it’s okay to put out crap that is buggy and unplayable, but I think it’s a concept that can work well for the MMO genre, since MMOs are almost always in constant flux even after their official releases anyway.

I’m all-in on FFXIV at the moment so get ready for wall-to-wall FFXIV posts this week! Last time I wrote that Square Enix wouldn’t do much about their guild housing prices unless people didn’t buy them. After I wrote that, they backed off a bit on their ridiculous prices, but not by much. Out of curiosity, I snooped around the guild housing areas to see just how many of the plots had been bought up already, because I assumed people would buy them no matter how much they cost or how much mindless grinding they had to do.

Like just about everything in Final Fantasy XIV, seasonal events are kind of weird. I’m not really sure they should be called “events” at all. They are more like, you know, regular quests. In most games, a seasonal event is a big deal. There’s a big gathering of people. There are games and activities and daily event quests. There’s a special dungeon or a special boss to defeat. There are special mounts and costumes and occasionally some meaningful gear as rewards.

My main (and only, since you can play any class with the same character) in FFXIV is an Archer. (Or “ARC,” as they like to abbreviate class names to 3 letters for some reason - I still have trouble translating those - ARC looks like Archive to me - why is it hard to add three more letters to make “ARCHER?”) Archer is a straight-forward, low-stress ranged DPS class that’s fun to play.

When I first started playing FFXIV sometime around October 2013*, it was extremely quiet. Very few people made comments in the general chat. I’m sure we’re all used to a more-or-less constant scroll of adolescent jerkiness going on in MMO general chat, so it was weird and kind of nice that there was none of that in FFXIV. Most of what you saw, to be honest, was gold spam. Now, however, I see a lot more activity in the general chat.

If I’m to complete a full week of FFXIV posts, I need to think of one more topic to write about. I thought I would describe a typical play session. This one happened on a Thursday night. I login with my Miqote Archer. I’m semi-embarassed that I’m still playing the adorable cat girl with the squirrel tail that I made on a lark back when I started, but I’m stuck with her now because I’m not going back to level up another character now.

Have you ever wondered why there are so many MMO guides out there? Step-by-step walkthroughs and so forth? I think I know the answer. It’s because without Internet guides, most MMO game players would simply stand in one place and stare at the screen, paralyzed and unable to figure out what to do or how to do it. You can tell this from watching the global chat of a game that is in closed beta.

I’ve been trying to figure out the optimal length of a dungeon run. There’s a point beyond which the dungeon goes from “this is really fun” to “oh god I can’t escape and this is never going to end.” It’s usually a hard line, too. It’s never a gradual process. One minute things are great, and the next minute it’s a life-draining death march from which you can’t escape. For me I think that mark is around 30-35 minutes.

My Miqo’te archer is closing in on 50. With the crazy ridiculous bonus experience gained from a Low-Level Duty Roulette, she should get there tonight, Friday the 17th. (I write most posts in advance, by the way.) My archer has been going through some seriously odd fashion phases in the last ten levels. Everything was fine at first. She had a suitable outfit that reflected her spunky, squirrel-tailed, no-nonsense, tomboy attitude through most of her leveling.

I read a fluff article on MMORPG.com about 5 Things Rift Must Do In 2014, which got me thinking. What would it take to get me to play Rift again on a daily basis again in 2014? Well, the answer is pretty simple: Give me an expansion with new zones and more levels. (Alternately, if I totally ran out of stuff to do in other MMOs I’m playing, I would probably play Rift.

Due to a devastating blizzard of perhaps a half an inch of fine powdery snow, I had 2 extra hours one morning to look at The Origins of Madness, the new Living Story content for Guild Wars 2. I patch up, log into my Necro, and I have mail telling me to go to Lornar’s Pass. Naturally it’s one of the places my Necro hasn’t been so I can’t fast-travel there, so I get out my Norn Ranger, who has been all through those wintry mountains.

I read Scree’s A Snapshot of Pantheon, an excellent summary of the things that Brad McQuaid wants to do with Kickstarter MMO Pantheon: Something of Something. I’ll save most of my comments on Brad’s game vision for another post, or never, because I don’t think it will get funded. The part about changing the Holy Trinity model is what stood out to me today. Apologies for quoting so much of this:

I am blatantly stealing TAGN’s post subject here, which is the question of who to boost to 90 for Warlords of Draenor. My situation is a lot different than his though, because I only play WoW when I’m really bored with other games, and my highest-level character has only recently broken into the Wrath of the Lich King era of the game. Hunter? This was the second character I created when I started WoW in 2006, and my second-oldest surviving MMO character.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the news about SOE closing down Vanguard, Wizardry Online, and two other MMOs. Vanguard is a game that I always wanted to play more, but I could never seem to keep it on any kind of daily schedule. I always thought of it as a “crutch” game - I knew if there was absolutely nothing else to do, and I didn’t want to spend any money, I could always fire up Vanguard and be entertained for a little while.

I reached level 50 in Final Fantasy XIV and entered “the endgame,” that fabled zone where only the elites live. Now I can evaluate FFXIV’s version of what some vehemently insist is “the only real game.” As with any MMO (except GW2), the FFXIV endgame is a gear grind. Your basic goal is to increase the “average item level” of your gear. This in turn allows you to unlock more and more difficult instances, in which you can acquire gear with higher item levels.

In another post I wrote about your basic objectives in FFXIV endgame and what there is to do, but in this post I’m going to talk more frankly about the more practical experience of what the endgame is like when you’re not in a big Free Company with lots of people available at your level. It’s like sitting around waiting in a queue for a long time. Again. And again.

Apparently the NDA was lifted, so here’s my first impression of the game: It doesn’t have invert mouse yet, so it’s a major, major chore to play it. It literally boggles my mind that devs don’t include this in their alphas, or even their finished games. I mean, surely it must be a built-in feature of the game engine somewhere, right? Even if it’s a stupid registry key somewhere, show me where it is!

Due to a heat pump failure, my normal schedule of writing scintillating posts (ha!) was totally borked. But lucky for you, I found some posts that I have previously rejected as being totally lame and irrelevant, pulled from the dregs of the barrel of mediocrity. My LoTRO Hunter reached level 48. Normally a level like “48” doesn’t seem like that much of an achievement, but in LoTRO I feel like it takes an eternity* to level, so each new number is a major milestone.