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The Daily Grind: What MMO slang are you sick of hearing?
Wrath babies. I hate the term. I hate everything it stands for. I hate the way it's used by old-school World of Warcraft players to dismiss the opinions of those who started playing later. It doesn't even make sense -- in pretty much every genre, there's always someone more old-school than you. You started in Vanilla? Someone else started in beta. And someone else started in alpha. And someone else before that. And a whole bunch of people started in games long before WoW showed up; all WoW players are "babies" by comparison. It's a pointless pissing contest that shuts down real debate about the quality of a game's content in any era. I'd rather never hear the terms "fail," "pay-to-win," "TORtanic," "frothies," and "dumbing down" again, either, and "such-and-such-game's NGE" can jump off a nice tall cliff. They're overused to the point that they are meaningless. But those are just my pet peeves. What MMO slang would you love to see nuked from orbit? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Do you think MMOs should be harder?
For every person I see cheering the rise of accessible games, I see another lamenting the "dumbing down" of MMOs. And while I've always liked a good challenge, it seems to me that "challenge" is usually conflated with "tedium" -- most MMO "challenges" test my patience, not my skill. I can understand not wanting a game to be a faceroll, but I'm also glad that we don't have to be professional e-sport champs to participate in this hobby. Still, there's plenty of room between those two extremes for upping the difficulty of combat and crafting without resurrecting obnoxious mechanics like corpse runs and experience loss. What do you think -- should MMOs be harder? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Soapbox: Polished vs. feature-rich
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. A few weeks ago I wrote a Soapbox article that exposed the flaws in the MMO first kiss theory. It generated more discussion than I anticipated, much of it spiraling off into tangents like MMO design, sandbox and themepark elements, and the seeming incompatibility between a polished game and a feature-rich game. It's this last bit that I'd like to discuss today, and you'll have to forgive me if we tread some familiar ground in the process. While there are many fascinating perspectives and debates in our bizarre hobby, none is as perplexing to me as the disconnect between gamers who want more game and those who want less game, highly polished.
