Stay tuned to find out!

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

Special Guest Rantalyst

• Brian Gardner

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

Guest rantalyst Brian Gardner joins us once more for a spirited discussion on our first impressoins of a little BioWare game you may have heard of by now, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

…and then proceeds to be even more negative than we were.

Topics discussed include MMOs as “toys” vs. “stories,” Guild Wars 2, the pain of Final Fantasy XI, and the upcoming release of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

I doubt it, but we’re back, anyway!

Taking some time to get our bearings again after a long absence from recording, we sit down to discuss what we’ve been up to since our last episode in May of 2010…

Click here to download.

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

Don’t you hate it when people spam your Facebook page with a bunch of random nonsense about pink cows lost on their farm, muffins in their restaurant, or needing to put out a hit on someone in Cuba?

Then man, are you ever going to hate the next few years of MMO gaming, if SOE has anything to say about it.

Topics

• What we’ve been playing
• SOE Releases The Agency: Covert Ops, a “Facebook MMO”
• The Agency: Covert Ops sets us off on a “social media gaming” rant
• Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer Goes Live
• Silverlode Announces Naval MMORPG Captains of DarkTide
• The Fickle Nature of the Fandom, Re: The Carrie Gouskos Interview

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

It’s been far too quiet around these parts, lately. But, hopefully things will be getting back to normal soon.

E3 is coming up next month, and it’s always a crowd-pleaser.

Until then, we have some actual honest to God news and features for you this week. Not the least of which is Carrie Gouskos sitting down with Steve to have a little chat about Warhammer Online. And by little, we mean 40 minutes straight.

Scheduling conflicts meant that she couldn’t actually join us on the podcast proper, but we know that “reading four pages of solid walls of text” isn’t really the fashion these days, and we threw the audio into the show, anyway.

NOTE: In response to feedback regarding a technical problem with the audio only playing through one stereo channel, I’ve gone back and saved the file in mono as a workaround. Quality may suffer slightly.

Please do not point out the irony of griping to someone about bugs in their game, and then having to patch an mp3 after release. – Steve

Topics

• What we’ve been playing
• Pre-recorded interview: Carrie Gouskos, Producer of Warhammer Online. Audio begins at 9:10
• Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer Releases May 11th
• Fallen Earth “Restructures” Its Staff
• Alganon Released. Again
• The MMO Gamer 3.0

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

It’s been a real slow couple of news weeks in the world of online gaming.

So slow, in fact, that we skipped last week’s recording entirely, and the sum total of two week’s worth of news barely even broke the 20 minute mark, making this the shortest non-Power Level show we’ve ever done.

On a technical note, we were testing out a new piece of recording software for this show, and it ended up making Jeffrey sound like he was talking through a tin can on a string. We will not be using it again.

Topics

• Steve talks Jeffrey into playing WAR, after being tired of ranting about it all by himself. And then…
• Wasn’t April Fools Last Week? Mythic Billing Mistake Overcharges Some DAoC, WAR Players 1,000%
• Quest Online Suffers Corporate Coup. We discuss this in a calm and intelligent manner.

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

In this week’s show we’re joined by special guest Fred Howard, Vice President of Marketing for KingsIsle Entertainment, who takes us through some of the finer points of what Wizard101 has to offer.

Topics

• Special Guest: Fred Howard
• EverQuest Turns 11 Years Old
• Tales Runner Welcome Package Giveaway
• Red 5 Receives $20 in Funding from The9
• Star Trek Online Season 1: Common Ground Announced
• The Secret World’s In-Game Trailer

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews
• Siam Choudhury

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

In this week’s show Jeffrey and Steve are joined by The MMO Gamer’s own Kumar Daryanani, who braved the mean streets of San Francisco to bring us exclusive coverage of GDC 2010.

Listen in as they discuss not meeting John Romero, why Turbine is making money hand over fist charging $2.00 for imaginary hair dye, what Heatwave Interactive is up to, and much, much more.

Topics

• The most interesting sights and sounds of GDC 2010.
• Upcoming features from the show.
• Microtransactions vs. subscription vs. DLC.
• What we’ve been playing: Steve rants about Warhammer Online. Again. No, this is not a repeat from the last six shows.

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews
• Kumar Daryanani

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

In this week’s show we’re joined by Sean Stalzer, sometimes better known by his nickname “Dragons,” to touch on the finer points of what it’s taken to keep The Syndicate, one of the largest and longest-running guilds in MMO history, up and running for over 14 years, and the relationships it has built with developers over that time.

Topics

• Special Guest: Sean Stalzer
• What we’ve been playing
• Lord of the Rings Online Volume III: Book 1: Oath of the Rangers
• EverQuest 2: Sentinel’s Fate Released
• Heatwave Interactive Picks up Gods & Heroes IP and Game Engines
• Dungeons & Dragons Online Hits 1 Million Users
• Alganon Goes Subscription-Free
• Bigpoint to Publish Battlestar Galactica Online, Browser Based MMOG

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews
• Siam Choudhury

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

In this week’s show we’re joined by Gordon Farrell of Reverie World Studios to discuss Dawn of Fantasy, the company’s inaugural MMORTS.

Gordon is Lead Writer on the project, and as story quality (or lack thereof) in the genre is a favorite topic of discussion here at The MMO Gamer, you can bet that we had a lively conversation.

For those wondering about his credentials to pontificate on such topics, when he’s not working on Dawn of Fantasy, Gordon teaches screen and playwriting at NYU, as well as courses in Narrative Theory for Electronic Games, which he literally wrote the book on.

Having said that, it was Technical Difficulties Week here at Working As Intended, and as a result the audio quality of this podcast is not quite up to par with some of our other productions.

But, if you can bear with the occasional hiccup (and our usual epic-length interviewing style) you will be rewarded.

Topics

• Special Guest: Gordon Farrell. Topics of discussion include building a story-centric RTS, “serious writing” in the gaming industry, and of course, the age-old debate whether or not games can ever rise to the level of art.
• Age of Conan Introduces Update 6 – Return of Thoth-Amon
• Allods Online Enters Open Beta
• EVE Online Announces Tyrannis, Expansion Allowing Planet Interaction

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews
• Siam Choudhury

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

In this week’s show, we largely focus on the declining difficulty of the modern MMO genre (or as many people call it, the ‘dumbing down’) in order to appeal to a wider audience than its original base.

Using STO as a jumping off point for the discussion (sorry, Cryptic, we’re going to stop ranting about your games eventually, we swear), the conversation weaves its way from the Sunwell in World of Warcraft, to Golden Axe back in the coin-op days of yore.

Guest Rantalyst Brian Gardner makes his first appearance on the show, to discuss his theory of “The Lost Horizon.”

Topics

• What we’ve been playing… which goes on for 40 minutes straight.
• Star Trek Online Introduces the Borg Content Update
• STO Fans set a new world record for the most people dressed as Star Wars characters at one time. Surprisingly, the record was not set at Comic Con.

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

Guest Rantalyst

• Brian Gardner

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

In this week’s show we’re joined by Sara Kaplan of Sony Online Entertainment to discuss their Gamers in Real Life (G.I.R.L.) scholarship, currently entering its third year, which aims to get more women working in the gaming industry.

For additional information about the G.I.R.L. scholarship, including deadlines, rules, and application requirements, be sure to pay a visit to the official website: http://www.station.sony.com/girl

Topics

• Special Guest: Sara Kaplan, Manager of Corporate Communications at Sony Online Entertainment, fills our listeners in on the particulars of the G.I.R.L. scholarship program.
• Aika Online Beta Key Giveaway
• Free Realms Registers 8 Millionth Account
• Cryptic Studios Registers 1 Million Accounts Across Champions Online and Star Trek Online

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews
• Siam Choudhury

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

Welcome to Episode 19 of Working as Intended!

What are you still reading this for?

Go listen, already!

Chop chop!

Topics

• Power Level, a podcast-within-a-podcast response to people complaining we talk too much
• What we’ve been playing: The MMO Conspiracy
• Star Trek Online has gone live; but is it ready?
• FunCom Reveals Northern Grasslands for Rise of the Godslayer
• The Secret World Teases with Kingsmouth Website
• Major Layoffs at Red 5 Studios

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews
• Siam has been living in a hobo shack  in a peat bog somewhere in Ireland for the past several weeks, and was still unable to join us for this show.

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

Let it not be said that we do not listen to our critics and take their suggestions seriously.

A number of people have pointed out since we began our Working as Intended podcast last year that we tend to sometimes talk… a bit much.

Fifteen minutes, they said, would be much more reasonable to listen to than 45.

But to our thinking, a fifteen minute podcast would meet, at best, Web 2.5 standards. We here at The MMO Gamer have always prided ourselves on being ahead of the gaming journalism curve, and so, after expert consultations with groups of futurists, science fiction authors, CERN researchers, and the Umbrella Corporation, we bring you the world’s first-ever Web 3.0 podcast.

Our Web 2.0 podcast, Working as Intended, will be published at its regular time on Monday.

Topics

• It’s two minutes long, just listen to the thing.

Starring

• Jeffrey ”The Ice Man” Philipp
• Steven “Sdog” Crews

In the bold world of Web 3.0, feedback is irrelevant. We’re so meta, we’re in the cloud. Your negative vibes cannot touch us. However, if you’re still stuck in 2009, you can send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

Jeffrey and Steve have been playing Star Trek Online, and they do not mince words in their assessment of it.

Will the game be ready for release? Will it appease the most Klingon-fluent Trek fans? Will Lassie be able to get help for Timmy who has fallen down the old well?

You’ll have to listen to this week’s show to find out!

Topics

• Jeffrey: The once-jilted Cryptic fan, eager to bring a fresh set of eyes to Star Trek Online. Steve: The jaded cynic who would give his own mother a bad review if she produced an MMO. Who will reign supreme in the battle of the Podcast Pundits?!
• Global Agenda Releases New Launch Trailer, Launches February 1st.
• Applications Open for SOE’s Third Annual G.I.R.L. Scholarship

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

There wasn’t much news to report this week.

As such, the bulk of the podcast is comprised of our conversation with Matt Mihaly, CEO of Sparkplay Media, regarding his current project Earth Eternal as well as his history with real-money trading, text-based games, and the current state of the industry at large.

As a personal aside, I strongly encourage everyone to head over to Earth Eternal’s official website and give it a shot, if for no other reason than it is the only game I have ever played which allowed me to roll a bipedal neon pink pig with a green mohawk.

Topics

• Special Guest: Matt Mihaly. Topics include Sparkplay Media’s free-to-play MMO currently in open beta, Earth Eternal, real-money trading, making the transition from the world of MUDs, and much more.
• Star Trek Online Enters Public Beta
• BioWare Confirms Spring 2011 Release for Star Wars: The Old Republic

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

Tune in to listen and catch up on the latest news and discussions with host Jeffrey Phillip and co-hosts Steven Crews and Siam Choudhury.

Topics

• EVE Online Breaks Another PCU Record
• LEGO Universe Playable at CES in Las Vegas
• Meridian 59 and Near Death Studios Close Down
• Star Trek Online Releases New Trailer
• Blizzard Helps Catch Fugitive with Help of World of Warcraft
• The MMO Gamer is Looking for Daily News Reporters

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews
• Siam Choudhury

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

We hope you have enjoyed this year and look forward to everything we will bring you in 2010!

Topics

Top 10 Most Read Features of the Year

1. Star Wars: The Old Republic – A New Hope for MMOs?
2. Bridging the Culture Divide: NCsoft’s Brian Knox on Aion’s Plans to Bring East and West Together at Last
3. Age of Conan Director Craig Morrison, Part One: Why Can’t MMOs Just be Fun?
4. Review: Runes of Magic
5. Impressions: Aion Closed Beta Event 3
6. BioWare’s Blaine Christine Talks Heroism, Villainy, and Why You Would Play Anything But a Jedi in Star Wars: The Old Republic
7. Age of Conan Director Craig Morrison, Part Two: Gamers are Sociopaths, EQ Clones are Dead, and Why Nobody Reads Quest Text
8. Paul Barnett Speaks, Part One: His Griefer Son, the Meaning of Creativity, and Dating Games Workshop’s Daughter
9. First and Second Impressions: Warhammer Online
10. Paul Barnett Speaks, Part Two: Why Games Aren’t Art, and Hardcore MMO Players Are Yesterday’s News

Top 10 Memorable News of Year

1. Richard Garriott Sues NCsoft for Fraud: Seeks $24,000,000
2. Mark Jacobs To Leave Mythic: BioWare Now in Charge of Both Companies
3. Trading of Virtual Goods Banned in China
4. Console-Only MMOFPS DUST 514 Revealed by CCP Games
5. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Announcement Trailer, Website
6. Champions Online Released
7. Aion: The Tower of Eternity Released
8. Fallen Earth Released
9. The MMO Gamer’s Working As Intended Podcast Episode One!
10. Metaplace.com shuts down

Hosts & Guests

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews
• Siam Choudhury

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

Topics

• Steve, Jeffrey, and Mobin start ranting. They don’t stop for 50 minutes.
• Oh, and I think they also managed to work in some news, at the end.

Hosts & Guests

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews
• Mobin Koohestani

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!