Almost Heroes: Bringing The Community To You

Almost Heroes.

Yeah, I know it’s the title to a movie, but it it is also the name of the first guild I ever joined when I started playing MMOs back in EverQuest on the Lanys T’Vyl server (best server EVER, anywhere, anygame).  It’s also a title that to me is so much more than either of those things. To me, those two little words nearly buckle under the weight of the importance that they carry to the MMO communities.  Because, isn’t that exactly why you play them?  Everyone wants to be the hero that rescues the princess, or saves the town.  Heck, some of you even want to be the villain that kidnaps the princess!  Bottom bottom line is, is that a lot of you play MMOs to be the star, to be heroic.  But you can also do that offline with single player role playing games, or even action titles.

What splits MMOs out from the rest of the mold and genres out there, is that not only are you the hero, but so are your fellow server-mates.  There were two things that really drew me in when I started playing EverQuest back in 1999: First was the fantastic new world to explore, monsters to slay, and cool gear to acquire.  But the other was what I found to be the absolute best thing in MMOs to date: the people.  Social interaction, where you can be whomever you want to be without misconceptions based on a multitude of things in real life.  How you can meet people from all over the globe and be able to share something in common, or learn new things.  Good laughs, good times, and good friends.

Almost all the good memories I have from when I started MMOs are related to the friends that I have made, and the time I spent with them.  Some of those people I still talk to today.  Some of those people I have met in real life through gatherings.  The problem I have had lately, is that things just don’t seem the same anymore.  And I want to figure out why.  Am I just getting to be an old fogey, and my kids just turning me into “that guy” ?  I mean I am almost 30!

So that is why I am starting this column.  My wife proved herself to be the best thing that has ever happened to me once again, and bought me the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for WarCraft and a 60 day game-card.  It’s been a long time since I have played WoW.  I have played a tad since BC came out, but honestly, nothing over level 60 yet.  So it’s going to be an all new game for me, and I’m looking for people to share it with.
As much as I love MMOs, I wouldn’t go out and say that I’m a social butterfly.  In fact, its been quite the opposite for a while now.

But, the prospect of who people are behind their characters, especially now that WoW has captured the minds of millions of different people out there, is something that I still find terribly, well cool.  So hence this column.  I am going to be starting an Alliance character on the Duskwood server sometime this weekend.  I will post my character name, and how to look me up on Facebook, and I want to meet you guys.  Every week, I am going to try to interview your everyday average  MMO player.  It doesn’t matter if you play World of WarCraft, or EvE, or whatever.  I’ll ask you some questions about what game you are playing, why you chose that game/character/etc, and if your willing, a little bit about what you do in real life. That way you readers out there can meet your server-mates a little more in depth than a PuG for instance #12312432.

This is a great oppurtunity to get to know your fellow gamers!  I’ll post a new update once I get that character started, and in the meantime if any of you out there want to be an interviewee for the Almost Heroes, you can always email me at ryan@mmogamer.com.

Live From BlizzCon 2008: The First Hours

Traffic this morning was surprisingly light as I breezed down the 5 freeway into Anaheim. This was soon to change, however, as I pulled off onto Katella Blvd, the main drag to BlizzCon, and found a solid barrage of tail lights leading off toward the horizon.

The line to park.

I decided to bring up the rear, assuming that parking would go quick and painless as it had last time. This was soon dispelled as I drove past the first sign reading LOT FULL, with an arrow suggesting that I continue onward for additional convention parking.

Our line of cars inched forward, around one corner, then another, through stop signs, red lights, and past four different hotels.

Past lots 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… all with the familiar signs out front reading LOT FULL. And then, finally, almost 20 minutes later, way in the back at the ass-end of the convention center, where the shipping containers and liftjack cranes were stored, there was space.

I would soon find out that this was going to be far from a unique experience. If I had to sum up BlizzCon so far, I could do it with just one word:

Lines.

There are lines to apply for a job at Blizzard (a little anecdote about this later), lines to play Wrath of the Lich King, lines to have your picture taken with the cast of The Guild, lines to buy swag, lines to get free swag, standing in line to wait for the chance to get into another line to wait in line for something else.

Lines hundreds of people deep, wrapping around lines that are wrapped around secondary and tertiary lines to the point that you wonder how the people in them even keep track of where they’re going to end up when they finally reach the front.

When not standing in line, the crowds are packed so tightly around the various points of interest that moving through them is a constant exercise in “Pardon me,” “Excuse me,” “Coming through, please,” and the ambient body heat generated by thousands of people crammed into every available square foot causes you to instantly begin sweating bullets even in the cold and darkness of the show floor.

Still, for all of that, it’s an awesomely impressive spectacle to behold. There are very few companies in the entire world who could throw a party for themselves, charge over a hundred bucks a head for admission, and still have 10,000 people ready, willing, and eager show to up.

The true power of Blizzard can be seen not in WoW’s subscriber numbers, or the fact that StarCraft is the national sport of Korea, but in the costumes of fans dressed up as their characters, or the rapt faces of audience members, with expressions of divine reverence, listening to panel discussions on class design as if recieving holy writ from God himself.

And, yes, even the lines. Lines that would cause a riot anywhere else in the civilized world are tolerated here with great aplomb, people seeming to take them as a grand opportunity to socialize with others just like them, brought together by their common love of gaming.

On that subject, I haven’t had a chance to get any hands-on with WoTLK (there are lines in the press room, too), so I can’t really discuss that yet. But, I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t cover the most important part of any convention: The swag.

Blizzard utilizes a “random loot” system for their official swag bag, which is a fancy way of saying that some people get certain items, and others don’t. This is what I got in mine, your mileage may vary:

 

1. Diablo III stress ball
2. QQ tissue paper
3. RSA security key fob with a random number generator to thwart account theft
4. Purel Hand Sanitizer (I know a lot of bugs get passed around at conventions, but this one might be the wrong message to be sending to your fans)
5. WoW trading card game starter pack
6. Blow up Frostmourne
7. StarCraft 2 wrist sweatbands (Korean sized)
8. StarCraft board game set pieces
9. Diablo III cinnamon mints
10. Purple zerg ooze
11. Pandaren Brewmaster Brand bottle opener and beer can cozy
12. WoTLK light-up pen
13. Swag Dog mousepad
14. BlizzCon logo keychain
15. Undead Male Halloween paper mask

And a number of various advertisements, con schedules, maps, etc.

Finally, last but not least, my favorite moment of the con so far, sitting in the press room and overhearing this conversation on a staff member’s radio:

“Terry, I have this guy who is literally standing IN the recruiting booth. He’s been holding us up for thirty minutes and refuses to leave, demanding we hire him. You need to get over here right now.” “10-4.”

More updates to come as they’re warranted.

Thoughts on Warhammer Online: The Third Week, Part Two

Not surprisingly, I was correct in my assumption that Mythic would soon close the “AE your way to 40″ loophole, which they did the day following my second week wrap-up post.

But, that didn’t stop me from wanting to try it anyway. Not for the experience, but for influence.

As I mentioned in my third impressions post, there are a great deal of Public Quests in the game. Killing mobs and completing objectives in them rewards you with influence, and when you get enough of it, you can cash it out for a nice blue item reward.

Sounds like a sweet deal, right?

Not so fast. Once you start getting up there in levels, each chapter’s worth of influence begins to take a longer and longer period of time to fill up–chapter 1 might take you ten minutes, chapter 2 takes fifteen, and so on.

I’m now up to chapters 13 and 14, and barring the occasional exploit, grinding your way through the influence bar could easily take you two to three hours.

I think what they had in mind was that you could complete each of an area’s PQs from start to finish to max yourself out–but, some of them are much easier (or reward greater influence) than others, so naturally players gravitate towards the least risk for the most reward, and the rest of them largely sit undone.

So, the other day, two of my guildmates and I decided to get together and AE the hell out of everything in a PQ, which just so happens to be the Sorceress’ specialty.

This worked out surprisingly well–no doubt moreso due to the healing abilities of my guildmate than to my abilities as a tank–and we cleared everything out in record time, never once even getting low on health, despite the fact that I was constantly rounding up and nuking over a dozen mobs.

When I hit 25 and trained the spell Pit of Shades, PQ clearing suddenly became even easier. The spell is so ungodly overpowered (particularly due to the fact that I’ve been putting nearly all of my mastery points into Destruction, which increases the strength of AE abilities) that I only have to cast it once and those aforementioned dozen mobs are laying dead on the floor.

All of this damage-dealing ability, however, while nice in PvE does have its price to pay in PvP. If someone (particularly a melee someone) is really determined to kill me, there’s not a whole lot I can do about it, aside from running away.

Sorceress has very limited control… you have a root on a long timer, and a 40% snare that’s a three second cast and requires another spell to already be active on the target.

This, combined with the traditionally low armor and HP on caster classes does not make for particularly high survivability.

To close out this week’s post, I’d like to spend a little while discussing the Tier 3 scenarios… or, more specifically the Tier 3 scenario, as no one on my server seems to be interested in queueing for anything else: Tor Anroc.

The map features the classic oddball mechanic: Get to ball, pick ball up, make sure other team does not get ball, collect points as long as ball is in your possession.

Where this formula goes awry is when you add high, narrow walkways over lava, and then make sure you equip both of the teams with numerous AE knockback abilities.

Ironbreakers and Swordmasters, in particular, seem to love nothing more than to charge someone, say, the ball carrier, or your pocket healer, and send them flying off into the abyss, all the while spamming the /lol emote.

Once you actually get into the lava, it’s not all that bad–around 500 damage a tick. The problem is, sometimes you can walk right out of it, and other times you’re rooted in place, unable to move an inch, seemingly at the random whim of the game. This fact makes what might be a minor inconvenience completely and utterly infuriating.

Add this to the fact that there are several “cracks” where players run the ball to nearly inaccessible areas to prevent it from being taken away from their team, and the map is cheap incarnate.

I queue for it only under extreme duress, as it’s the only one that’s available 95% of the time. If I didn’t, my renown rank would fall too far behind my PvE level and I would be unable to equip my set items.

This is all the more heartbreaking because most of the other Tier 3 scenarios–Doomfist Crater, which I enjoy because of its huge AE potential, in particular–are actually great fun to play.

There is a special place in Hell awaiting the members of the Tor Anroc design team, where the Devil himself will hurl them a hundred feet through the air into a pit of boiling lava while doing the /lol emote for all of eternity.

Thoughts on Warhammer Online: The Third Week

Strange though it may sound, I was actually somewhat looking forward to attending E for All this past weekend.

EA was one of only a handful of large companies exhibiting at the con’s inaugural event in 2007, and one of the biggest games at the entire show was Warhammer Online.

I was, in turn, one of the few media types dumb enough to attend. As a result, I got to spend many an hour just casually playing the game and speaking to members of the development team, something which rarely occurs at larger events where every last available block of time is divvied up between a thousand different bloggers, fansites, and media outlets for maximum PR exposure.

Last year when I arrived I’d only played the game for a couple of hours–back at Games Day LA. This year, with several solid weeks of WAR retail under my belt, I was looking forward to a lively rematch.

That is, until I contacted Mythic’s PR company and discovered that they weren’t even planning on showing up.

After several more calls to several other PR companies returned similar results, I was forced to arrive at the conclusion that E for All 2008 wasn’t even worth making the thirty minute drive to LA and paying $12.00 to park. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

But, life goes on, and my adventures in WAR continue, nonetheless.

I tend to prefer leveling purely through PvP means: Killing people, completing scenarios, and turning in the repeatable quests for them.

This is oftentimes a problem when either no one is queuing up for them or participating in world RvR. The fact that there are several posts on every (unofficial) server board I’ve read, stating things to the effect of, “Hey, Order, get on our Vent and let’s organize a time and a place for some fighting!” reveals one of the serious design flaws in the game.

Unless a keep is under attack–and, now that I think of it, another serious design flaw is that if one person hits one guard standing outside of a keep, a message will be broadcast that it’s under siege, even if no one ever got within a hundred yards of the gate–the battleground areas within each tier oftentimes feel like ghost towns.

No one wants to bother venturing inside if there’s no one fighting, and no one is fighting because no one wants to go inside–because no one is fighting.

The strategic objectives on the map seem to be purely for bragging rights or to harvest renown (you get 800 in total for capturing a Tier 3 objective, not too bad for killing five mobs), as the zone-wide rewards they offer aren’t substantial enough to get people to bother with retaking them on their own initiative.

This leaves us with keeps, which generally get taken in the dead of night or very early in the morning when no one is on, as a defended keep is nearly an impossible objective to take without serious organization–which most of the pickup groups attempting them do not have.

We attempted to retake the two keeps in Dark Elf Tier 3 last night, and faced stiff opposition–from the game itself. Although the attackers and defenders might have had one raid group between them on both sides, the game’s FPS at times slipped into slideshow mode for me, even after I went into Options and set everything to the lowest possible rung.

After that, I’m not really looking forward to city sieges unless they patch in some serious performance improvements.

But, even in the dead of night and with no defenders, taking out the keep lord the honest way seems to be a bit too much of a hassle for many players, and so two competing methods have cropped up to do keeps in easy mode:

“Bring so much DPS the lord dies in five seconds,” and, “Pull the lord outside of his room so that we don’t have to deal with his guards.” As I don’t want to encourage exploiters, I won’t mention just where people are pulling him, suffice it to say that it’s very, very cheap.

Such exploits and performance going into the tank during large battles cast something of a pall over the whole game, and I hope they’ve got the cat o’ nine tails out in the programming department, working them sixteen hours a day until fixes are produced.

I’ll continue this post tomorrow with the story of my adventures in AE grinding, and why the people who designed the Tor Anroc scenario should be tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity.

Thoughts on Warhammer Online: The Second Week

Things have been looking up a bit since my prior post. My relentless nagging has worn down several of my friends, who were finally convinced to give the game a try.

This has, however, turned into something of a double-edged sword for me. While the game is much more fun to play when grouped with people you know, it’s also meant that I had to roll a new character to help them catch up to my Sorceress, which is going to put something of a delay on my review.

I’d like to apologize to all five of you out there waiting with bated breath for my verdict on whether or not you should rush out to buy a copy.

It would seem there are plenty of people who need no such leveling assistance from me, as I’ve already heard reports of numerous characters hitting 40 (the maximum level) within the past week, several of them on my own server. The trick to this superhuman feat of powerleveling is apparently just an abundance of patience:

In Public Quests, the first stage generally involves having to kill dozens, or even hundreds of mobs. Out of necessity due to such numbers, they tend to respawn very quickly, and aren’t particularly spaced out from one another. So, people just go in with a Marauder, round up five or six at a time, and AE them down. Rinse, repeat, level 40 in six days /played.

I seriously doubt this was what Mythic had in mind when they designed the PvE side of the game, and it’s likely to get changed very, very soon.

These friends and I have now managed to get a guild up and running, so I’ve been able to see the Living Guilds system in action first-hand.

It’s about what you would expect: As members grind, the guild receives experience, as well, and once a certain threshold is reached it gains a level.

Level 1 is simply, “You can have a guild.” Level 2 allows you to access a calendar to schedule raids and whatnot, level 3 allows you to set up taxes on members, and so on.

This also goes all the way up to 40, by which time you’ll have access to a “communal” guild hall, several standards, custom heraldry, and the ability to claim keeps, providing a steady stream of experience towards the guild’s level… which, I suppose isn’t particularly useful if it’s already 40.

We’re not a very large guild–we might be able to fill a group and a half if everybody logged in at once–so the leveling has been relatively slow. Guild levels seem to be directly proportional to the number of people invited, so while we’re level 6, other guilds on the server are pushing level 20, and I’m sure something like the 500+ member Something Awful goonsquad would have capped out already.

It’s not the most elegant system in the world, but, given enough time everyone will eventually hit 40, and as the old saying goes, it doesn’t matter how you get there as long as you get there.

We’ve also been partaking in a great deal of RvR over the past week. Mostly scenarios, but I did have the opportunity to see one keep defense first-hand. Open-world RvR is really what the game should be all about, so I was both excited about the opportunity, and disappointed that it didn’t happen more often.

Keeps are arranged in a very defensible format: A lower floor with several guards and a door that must be rammed down, and a narrow staircase leading up to the next level, where the keep lord, who must be defeated to claim it, resides.

As has been mentioned many times in the past, WAR is one of the few MMOs out there that actually features collision detection between players, and in keeps this plays a part in a big way: Parking two giant Black Orcs at the top of the stairs, while the healers stand back and keep them alive, and DPS blows the hell out of everybody trying to come up makes for a very good time. My Sorceress in the engagement I participated in was easily pushing over 1,000 DPS.

But, as I mentioned, keep defenses have so far between few and far between. More often, guilds just get together at 3 AM and take every keep on the map without having to bother with opposition, rather than having to deal with defenders during prime time. I could see this being a large problem once guilds start actually claiming keeps, when members log on the next day to find it’s been taken during the night, with nothing they could have done about it–unless they wanted to come in to work on two hours of sleep.

Scenarios are still fairly fun in their own right, though, and I look forward to trying out the Tier 3 versions once everyone is caught up. As you can see by the scoreboard on the left, sacrificing your clothes for DPS occasionally does pay off.

Also, in a development which I take full credit for, just today they announced that the glaring oversight I groused about last week, not being able to queue for any scenario in a tier from any zone, has been corrected. I greatly applaud this apparent willingness to listen to the playerbase–I just hope people don’t start demanding the nerfs to start rolling in, next.

That’s the gist of my second week in Warhammer Online. Tonight I should be able to get back to leveling my main, and by this time next week, hopefully, part one of our review will be available for all to see. Until then, stay tuned.

Gold Farmers: Man or Machine?

As some of you may or may not know, I don’t live in any of the “cool” gamer places where I can buy all the new shit you and your friends have. Oh, I try. Dear Lord, I try. But, in the communist country known as China - there are no fair deals.

By living in China I miss the coolness factor of living in Japan with early release dates, while simultaneously missing the English dubs and “big bang” releases that the States usually garner.

Yes friends, what I usually get to enjoy is the toe jam underfoot of every wonderful gaming experience imaginable. Gold farmers, piracy, poor quality, cheap knock-offs and a small, dimly lit gaming store which hasn’t been cleaned or dusted in months, but a store which the owner assures me is top rate.

Normally when we think of gold farming, we think of little Asian machines that, when looked at from afar, might do some sort of strange idiosyncratic event like twitching or ticking every few moments while clicks of the mouse fill the room like some evil back-busting opera.

They all have such amazing lives, sitting there at their computer screen day after day for 12 hours a day playing video games. They’re probably all guys as well. Oh yes, not only do they bleed dry the experiences we cherish so much for us, and for themselves, but it’s also a sausage fest.

So imagine my surprise when my friend visits me in a little city called Yangshuo with his new girlfriend who he tells me was a freakin’ gold farmer. I must have blacked out when he told me because when I arose, I saw nothing but tequila shots sitting before me and it was 12 hours later.

“What kind of girl would gold farm?” I ask myself. Poor, miserable and ugly - no doubt. Probably scurvy chick, with a hump, who was thrown out of her home because of the one child policy who subsequently lived on rats and random garbage strewn about the streets.

When she finally grew old enough to crawl, she drug herself from her rubbish-infested home to the door step of an internet bar where the kindly old man running it drew upon the Christian favor (or lack thereof ) to put her into slave labor.

No. Heavens to Betsy, no.

What stood before me was a 5′2 smoking Asian bombshell who clung to my fat friend’s chubby fingers like it was going out of style. Who knew DDO’s (Dungeons & Dragons Online) gold farmers were so smoking hot? If we did, we wouldn’t have been treating them all like shit, would we? In fact, I’ve switched accounts already!

Not only are these Asian beauties human, but they sit alone in a dark cellar by themselves for 12 hours a day, then go to sleep on cots nearby until the next begins and they can do it all over again. The only other human interaction is the MMO’s nerdcore themselves.

So how did he get this little thing to prance around him daily like she was Tae-Bo’ing? The story goes like this:

My friend was playing DDO like he always does. Eventually, he received an advertisement for gold, like you always do. What makes him unique is that instead of ignoring the ad, he actually replied. He quoted some insane amount of gold like $1,000,000 worth.

The girl, who we’ll call Junebug was working as an English translator for the gold farming company/sweatshop. The other farmers would get a reply and she’d go around translating everything and speaking with the customers. She was better than most because she actually has a degree in Business English from one of the top universities in China.

Upon receiving the ridiculous request, she continued talking to him. Not because he was witty, like he might tell you, but because she was told to by her boss in hopes that he would shell out some cash. Now, you may think my friend had the idea to rope in the girl the entire time, but this is not so. He just felt like BS’ing with a gold farmer.

As time progressed, he would get a message from Farmer Bug every morning he logged in and he would continue to BS with them until he finally asked for ‘his’ (my friend thought every farmer was a guy, like we all do) MSN addy so that he could continue talking to ‘him’ out of game.

Sure enough, he added ‘his’ MSN and looked at the picture and then asked one of the most brilliant questions of our time: “Why do you have a picture of a (hot) chick as your icon?”

“Because I am.”

From then on, his brain exploded with possibilities and doubts, but he continued talking to her for an entire year on and off cam, thus proving that she is, indeed, either a chick, or one crafty son of a bitch.

A year later, he went to the Olympics and she quit her job to be his guide for two months. Thus, I find them sitting in front of me drinking genuine Jose Quervo. Or, I guess I could have blacked out and made it up.

Thoughts on Warhammer Online: The First Week

According to Mythic’s art department, that outfit you see on the left is a “gown.” I don’t know who they think they’re fooling with that one.

There were only two classes in the game that really appealed to my sense of “I want to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible,” the Bright Wizard, and Sorceress. After running down the skills and talents for each and finding them to be nearly identical, with only the skill names and damage types changing, it came down to a matter of aesthetics:

Do I want to play a Bright Wizard, and have my character stuck with some sort of bizzare Dragon Ball Z-esque spiked mohawk or Bride of Frankenstein beehive?

Or, would I prefer to run around half-naked, looking like a two-bit whore?

In the end, I decided that sometimes you have to be willing to sacrifice your clothes for DPS.

I’ve been playing my Sorceress for a week now, ever since the Collector’s Edition headstart began last Sunday, in preparation for writing my full review of the game. You can consider this (and any further posts I make before publishing) the pre-view to the re-view.

The game has had a very pleasant launch so far, better I would say even than DAoC’s, which was no slouch to begin with. The servers have been up better than 99% of the time, with only middling lag, and while some of them do have queues, Mythic at least made the effort to clone the worst of them, giving players the opportunity to pick up where they left off with characters, guilds, and achievements intact on a brand new server.

The worst offender I’ve seen, Volkmar, had queues of 1-2 hours last night during primetime.

I’ve also been hearing reports of crashes to desktop, but have only experienced one of them myself so far. Everyone having them regularly seems to be playing the game on an nVidia card, while I use ATI. Perhaps, contrary to the sponsorship banner at the bottom of the official site, nVidia is not the way it’s meant to be played, after all.

The only major problem I’ve had with the game so far is most of my friends have refused to take it up with me, despite my begging, pleading, and threats of great bodily harm if they did not comply. They all seem far more interested in waiting two more months for Wrath of the Lich King to come out…  which I’m sure will no doubt stoke my undeserved reputation over on Warhammer Alliance of being an unabashed WoW fanboy.

So, I’ve mostly been soloing, which, despite Paul Barnette’s statements to the contrary, I haven’t been finding particularly fun. In scenarios you typically need a pocket healer following you around at all times if you want to live for more than 45 seconds–and the pickup groups I’ve been involved in haven’t been real big on healing, in general.

My other primary complaint is that doing the same scenario over and over again gets old after the fifth or sixth run, and to queue for another pairing’s instance you have to physically travel to their zones. Not letting you queue for all three of the tier 1 or 2 scenarios from any tier 1 or 2 zone in the game feels like a glaring oversight on Mythic’s part.

Still, Sorceress seems like a moderately overpowered class, and I reguarly top both the kills and damage charts, which is always gratifying.

Not particularly gratifying is the PvE side of the game, which I engage in while sitting in queues waiting for a scenario to open up (which on my server typically takes from ten to fifteen minutes). The quests are bland, interchangable, and all kind of meld into each other after awhile. Go here, kill this guy, bring me his head. Now go pick up a scroll off the ground and bring it back. Etc., etc.

If there were enough world PvP on my server to support it, I would never touch a PvE quest in the game from levels 1 through cap. For now, I just have to grin and bear it if I want to keep up with the curve.

That’s the gist of my first week in WAR. So far, I’ve found the PvP side of the game to be fast-paced, fun, and exciting, with the PvE side being exactly the opposite–dull, repetitive, the sort of things we’ve all seen before. Not much changed from my third impressions piece prior to launch.

For now I’m going to continue leveling, and I’ll probably sit down and write the first part of my full on review some time after I hit 20. Stay tuned within the next week or two for that.

The MMO Gamer Blog is Open for Business

Since the very day this site was founded, we have striven to offer our readers objective, unbiased (except in pieces clearly marked as opinion) and timely news and analysis regarding the MMO industry, free from the usual ranter and/or fanboy taint that pervades many of the other sites covering the genre.

Some of our detractors will no doubt debate whether or not those goals have been successfully met.

Still, all of us here are gamers first, and holders of very strong opinions on the games we play, just as I’m sure most of our readers are. Several members of our staff had recently expressed the desire to be given a means to voice those opinions here on the site when the subjects at hand didn’t warrant a full article or news post.

This blog came about as a result.

From this day forward we hope it will offer you a new source for intelligent insight and opinion on the inner workings (or non-workings, as the case may be) of the games our staff are currently involved in, as well as providing a somewhat more unfiltered and direct look at the rest of the industry as a whole.

Thanks for your continued readership, and stay tuned.