growing-pains
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Cryptic, Riot, and more weigh in on free-to-play growing pains
Anyone adamantly wanting a return to gaming where a handful of publishers and platforms run the show might need to acquire a time-machine to do so. In a recent article, various development studios -- including Cryptic Studios, Riot Games, and EA -- discussed the growth of free-to-play and how the model is affecting the games industry as a whole. According to these publishers, there's no argument that F2P will become a major force in the industry. Cryptic Studios COO Craig Zinkievich remarked that although F2P is stigmatized as evil in the social market, the recent influx of titles has gotten the core gaming audience more excited about the model. More consumer excitement, of course, leads to higher-quality games. Sean Decker, VP of EA's Play4Free label, noted, "The good thing about so many companies moving into the free-to-play space is that it's great for the players: the quality of graphics are going up, the quality of the gameplay is going up." However, in the rush to capitalize on F2P, some are going to crash and burn. Zinkievich said, "I think there will definitely be failures within the next 12 to 24 months. Many who are entering the market right now are doing it as almost a money-grab." He added, "But subscription is dead. [Star Wars:] The Old Republic was the biggest possible swing for the fences. There is no longer any argument over whether that can be done. Free-to-play is the way of the future. It is the new world." Does that include console gaming? According to these folks, yes.
How do we start a guild?
I'd like to take a moment to address another reader email. In this post I kind of skirt the direct issues of recruiting and establishing a guild bank. I offer my best advice on the absolute basics of starting a guild. Please ignore spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors in the reader's email, and direct all of your ire toward mine.heya,me and my friend want to start up our own to guild working towards raid progression. We have both done all pre 3.1 content on other characters on different servers and on moving to a new server have found it hard to find a guild that meets our needs/scheduale; thus we want to form our own guild. However neither of us has any experience in doing so, and would appreciate some tips on how best to start ie. how to recruit, how developed the guild bank needs to be etcthanksBefore you get started making your guild, I'd like to let you in on a little secret. Some of the most painful experiences in my life include boiling the skin off the back of my right hand with scalding water from a steam iron (you wouldn't notice the scar unless I pointed it out, but even 22 years later I use it to tell left from right), the massive hangover I had on 1/1/2000- three days after I got my tongue pierced (and working a double shift), and starting a guild with a handful of friends. My best advice is that unless there is a real need for a guild, don't do it. You and your friend may want to look for a guild that meets your needs, our readers have posted many that are looking for members.
Priests in Wrath: Analysis of Alpha talents
I would like to take a moment to talk about the leaked Priest spells and talents from the Wrath friends and family alpha. We have decided not to keep this information on the site for legal reasons, but there are many other places on the internet to find it, such as this wiki (which, by the way, seems to have been semi-locked to prevent recurrences of Tuesday night's rampant vandalization). Note that these are alpha leaks (for those not conversant with software testing, alpha comes before beta, and beta comes before release), and most of these talents and spells will change before Wrath goes live. Some of them will probably not be recognizably the same, or even there at all. Nevertheless, it's certainly something to talk about in a game that, in my opinion, has had far too little change over the past couple of years.
