This isn't exactly a rant, but this post is about a trend I'm not too happy about. Apologies to regular readers for the shift from my usual tone. More cheerful posting to resume as of my next one.Way back in December Star Trek Online experimented with a lottery system where players could buy red gift boxes from the item shop, and each box had a really small chance of containing a very nice star

City of Heroes/ Villains is having a free account reactivation weekend (thanks to Sente for the heads up!). City of Heroes is actually one of my favorite MMOs, I like to spend at least one random month there every year or so. One of the coolest things about it is that you can make almost any character you can dream up. In my hands, that usually means I make either a character based on an old

Work got a bit berserk lately. For several reasons I've barely been in town this month. In MMO space, the main thing I've been up to is prepping for the FtP transition in Age of Conan.Funcom reactivated my account until the end of May (tomorrow) recently, which was enough to get me to try the game out again. Not much has changed that I can tell on my low level guys (my max is a 25 HoX), but it

I've been playing Lord of the Rings Online since open beta. I've pre-ordered at every opportunity, and gotten free stuff each time. I also went lifer fairly early on which got me more free stuff. I got yet more free stuff by subscribing to PC Gamer around the time LoTRO launched (it came with a code as part of a promotional preview). Finally, I decided to buy the most expensive version of

This has to be the most stunning MMO news in a while to me: Star Wars Galaxies will be shutting down on December 15th. I saw "SWG shutting down" as the title of a thread over at MMORPG.COM and just assumed it was a troll post at first. But, no, really, it's shutting down (official announcement here).You can find an interview with John Smedly about it here. It contains as direct an admission

For the last few weeks, I've been asking myself "What am I trying to do with this blog?" To post my ruminations on this subject seems almost unimaginably self indulgent, but here I go. . . ;-)There were a few key points I had in mind when I started this blog. I wanted it to be nearly a strict MMO blog. I also wanted to point out in various ways that I don't think there's anything fundamentally

I absolutely love the ability to slot cosmetic items. Making my toon look the way I want is a game in-of itself as far as I'm concerned. Giving me cosmetic slots to fool with gives me a ton of extra gameplay, and for what would seem relatively few development resources . . .save implementing the system in the first place, of course. As an example, this is what my dwarf champion in LoTRO would

This post over at Blue Kae got me wondering why I am so much looking forward to Star Wars the Old Republic (which I have yet to pre-order, but plan to soon). My expectations for it as a viable long term MMO commitment aren't particularly stellar. However, as a game that I'll play for a month or two and enjoy, they are pretty high. More broadly, why do still I care about the Star Wars franchise

Several Diablo III news items have been making the rounds today. The two big ones are that (1) DIII is launching with an online for real-life-cash auction house (Blizzard will take a small cut of all transactions) and (2) DIII will require a live internet connection to play, even solo.I'm not sure how I feel about either. Certainly online enabled characters should be hosted on Blizzard's

Austin: Things have been slow on the blog because I spent last week in Austin, Texas. It was my first time there, and I really enjoyed myself. Great food, great nightlife, but hot as the dickens. During the summer months something like a million bats hang out under a bridge near the hotel I was staying in. They all fly out in a giant cloud near dusk. It's an impressive sight (I didn't film

[Warning, a bit of a rant. I spent last night experiencing one of my pet peeves in a party.] I know that some of us live in less than ideal environments for gaming. You might not be able to help the fact that there are screaming kids, a really loud television, or perhaps constant machine gun fire and explosions where you are playing from. If you are in a party using voice chat, the

A lot of tidbits have been on my mind lately. SWG: I finally made it to my second planet in Star Wars Galaxies, Naboo: You really really want to buy a swoop soon as you can afford one. Once you get over the steeper than usual initial learning curve, there really is a fun game buried in there. I've been tempted to make a short "things I wish I knew when I started" post. There are a lot of

This post over at I Have Touched the Sky (which contains one of my favorite quotes from the original Conan stories, btw) led me to this post over at Scary Booster, where Scary seems to have had some really bad experiences with other MMO gamers lately. In short, he feels that modern MMO communities are filled with asshats. He makes it sound almost as bad as X-box live ["shudder"].You will

The greater part of September seems to have vanished. This has been one of those weeks where I got a lot done and still don't feel like I'm on top of everything. A lot of neat little news tidbits have caught my eye, but I haven't taken time out to comment on them. So now I ramble...SWG: Star Wars Galaxies just launched atmospheric flight. You can now summon your space-ship and fly it around

It's fantastic. By far the most fun I've had in the Lord of the Rings Online since the launch of Moria. It expands on Tolkien's narrative in completely logical ways. It also offers vistas that I can absolutely imagine him creating if he had lived long enough to do it. The home of the falcon clan. One of the few clans of Dunlander's that were never corrupted by Sauroman's promises.I know that

Using the power of Google Insights, Tobold recently asserted that interest in massively multplayer online roleplaying games is declining. Looking at the most recent google insights results, interest in "mmmorpg" is down almost 40% from the peak in 2009. You get similar results from mmo. This isn't total voodoo, this tool does a very good job of reproducing trends we pretty much all agree are

Minor spoilers abound ahead, be warned!I'm about halfway through the Rise of Isenguard expansion in Lord of the Rings Online, I just started in the Gap of Rohan over the weekend. Towards the end of the first zone you catch a glimpse of a Dunlander village where preparations for war are busily underway. One thing that's pretty neat about this scene is all those tiny guys you see in the distance

One topic that seems to come up every so often is that hit points/ health/ morale are kind of absurd. Whether or not you agree with Wilhelm that they are especially absurd when using a blaster, I think we can all agree that the ability to withstand multiple lethal attacks is a fairly baldfaced sacrifice of realism in favor of gameplay. It's one of those things like level based combat and the

Like everyone else and their granny, I spent the weekend playing the beta of Star Wars the Old Rebublic. I went into the beta mainly to see how the game looks and runs on my current PC, which is almost three years old now. It runs just fine, but I can also see that I'll have to replace my PC in another year or so if I want to keep playing modern games. In any case there is nothing to stop me

[I'm not going to spread this chain any further, but I thank Blue Kae for inspiring me to post this] .Dear Santa,It's been a while since I've written to you. I don't even visit you in the mall these days, I know I've been lax. I do sometimes donate a little bit of money when I see you out ringing a bell next to one of those Salvation Army buckets, so there's that. In any case I hope that I've

Star Wars galaxies is one of those games I've read a ton about, but never really clicked with me. However, the news that SOE was shutting it down got me to sub up and see what the game is really like while I still could. I've been dutifully putting in at least a few hours a week, and I managed to get up to about level 40 on my main which is tons further than I’ve ever made it before.This is my

My lack of blog posts lately can be attributed to several factors. I was out of town for most of last month, doing real life things like hiking and hanging out with familly. Since I got back into town, I have also been obsessing so hard on Star Wars the Old Republic that when I get home from work I simply haven't wanted to spend an hour knocking out a blog post. It's odd to see my MMO addiction

The latest SWTOR patch apparently contained some serious cluster fornication for PvP players. Level 50 players are now looking at crazy ques to get into the regular battlegrounds due to faction imbalance and the general lack of level 50 players on most servers. Meanwhile, in SWTOR's open world PvP area Republic players are getting stomped on most servers. Unverified reports put Empire /

Lot's of new content coming down the pipe:Massively just posted a story that has a ton of interesting LoTRO news. The next full expansion will be called the Riders of Rohan. It will include mounted combat and raise the level cap to 85. Not very surprising so far, we all pretty much knew this was coming. However two items did come as a bit of a surprise: (1) players will gain the ability to

EA has announced that as of Feb 1 SWTOR only has 1.7 million active subs, which amounts to a mere 85% player retention rate. Obviously most of the folks that have tried SWTOR can't stand it. After the first six weeks, it seems that Star Wars the Old Republic is an abject failure.In all seriousness, I'm really glad to see that SWTOR is off to such a good start. It remains to be seen whether