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The Daily Grind: Is this a great time to be an MMO fan or what?
I don't often let fly with 200-word odes to positivity, but here lately, news from all around the MMO genre is conspiring to put me in a permanent good mood. Let's see, we've got new, shiny, and feature-rich darlings like WildStar and ArcheAge coming up. We've got some interesting developments in the gameplay department of The Elder Scrolls Online, and we've got a handful of promising indie titles including The Repopulation, Origins of Malu, Camelot Unchained, and others on the horizon. And that's without even mentioning quasi-MMO and Kickstarter king Star Citizen, which has both returned Chris Roberts to the public eye and proven that talented developers can give middlemen the middle finger and interact directly with their customers. So, how about it, Massively readers? Are you down on the MMO genre or do you join me in thinking that this is a great time to be a fan? 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: What's one great thing from every MMO you've played?
In my experience, most projects have at least one redeeming factor to it. Maybe it's not enough to carry the rest of the project's bloated corpse of fail, but it's still there. It can be an idea, a character, a story twist, a name, a setting, or something else. Similarly, with MMOs, I believe that there's at least one great thing in each game. Whether you hated it on sight, fell in love with it, grew to dislike it, or have regularly bashed it in your favorite MMO site's comment sections, if you're honest, you should be able to pinpoint that one thing. Today, I propose an interesting exercise. List all of the MMOs that you have played to any decent length (i.e., more than a one-hour trial), and then share with us one great thing from that game. Was it the graphics, the community, a cool gameplay feature, or another aspect entirely? If you're honest -- and push down that sarcasm that's threatening to bubble up -- I bet you can fill out this list completely. Get to it! 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 Lawbringer: Positive value creation from the negatives in the games industry
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? The no-win situation is, at its core, a sad state of affairs. Seriously, no one is winning in a no-win situation. In fact, everyone could be said to be losing. Piracy has been long held to be the dire no-win situation in the video game industry because it represents a perfect culmination of utter loss -- an infinitely copyable product that took millions of dollars to produce being distributed for free. No profit means the studio gets its windows shuttered and no one goes home employed. Last week, I read an article on PC Gamer that talks about Runic Games's Torchlight. The game is a fantastic spiritual successor to the Diablo series that the company's CEO, Max Schaefer, served as lead designer for. Runic Games was essentially bought by Perfect World, a Chinese MMO company that seeks to release an MMO version of the popular game. Schaefer has some different views and conclusions about how piracy effects his game. In a nutshell, Schaefer sees no problem with the millions of illegally downloaded copies of Torchlight in Asian markets. When the MMO is released, the brand recognition and audience building that piracy affords will bring in new customers for the eventual MMO, where it is harder to pirate a service. With so many games going online these days with multiplayer components requiring authentication or even a license purchase (as with used versions of PS3 and XBox 360 games), is this the right attitude to have in world where a game's success is made or destroyed based on sales? Is this line of thought able to coexist with the fickle dev studio and publisher system in place now in the industry? Ultimately, we can learn something from Schaefer's comments, especially about audience building. And, potentially, we can see the future of World of Warcraft's distribution as the game gets a bit heavy in terms of barrier to entry.
Wings Over Atreia: The positivity column
In the interests of bringing balance to the Force (and reminding ourselves that this is supposed to be fun) we'll use this week's edition of Wings Over Atreia to take a look at Aion's future. In light of recent announcements, you could make the case that it's pretty bright, in fact it may even be bright enough to merit the donning of fashionable eyewear. So, aside from paying tribute to Timbuk3 and aggravating the Debbie Downers in the audience, I feel the need to discuss the recent Aion happenings both here in the west and in Korea. Despite ripping on the game's grind a bit last week, the fact remains that I still enjoy it and it seems like NCsoft has at least turned the ship in the right direction, even if it's still proceeding at a glacial pace. Hit the jump to see what's worth looking forward to.
How reputation governs the game
Ravius over at Kill Ten Rats ruminates on the importance of reputation in these very social games that we're playing with each other, and it resonated with me in terms of a few different things going on in World of Warcraft right now. We've talked lots before about ninjas and how that back-and-forth works -- in that case, karma is directly driven by what other people think of you, and of course that's seen more weakly in lots of other places around the game, including guild recruitment, your friends list, and just the general server at large. Ravius talks mostly about the negative reputations we earn, and certainly that's a powerful motivator for a lot of people. But positive reputation is also a strong force in this game -- I'm interested to see how we deal with earning and keeping positive reputation in the new Dungeon Finder and eventually the Battle.net system. Gone may be the days when you build up a good reputation by saying "remember me if you need a good DPS" at the end of a run. It'll be interesting to see what methods we replace that one with.
The Daily Grind: Do you prefer good news or bad?
Today we're going to be a little bit meta for our discussion topic of the day and ask a very simple question with larger meanings: do you consider yourself on the positive or negative side of the fence? When you see news on the site, do you prefer the good news and the uplifting stories, or would you rather see things with a bit more bite to them? Certainly the negative can be a fair bit more entertaining, and if there's a game you don't like (which many of you seem to have) it's kind of nice to feel vindicated in your dislike. Positive news, on the other hand, can only bolster morale if you're a fan of the game in question -- but you get a lot more fuel out of that than a thin shot of schadenfreude. So. All things being equal, if we post a story about Game X, which you neither play nor have any strong opinions about -- are you happier if it's good news or bad news? And as a point tied to that, do you generally consider yourself to be a more positive person or a negative one?
HKO Rookie: Posting on the forums
It can be really hard to be new to any game or community. Sometimes you just don't know what to do or if a question has been asked before. Have no fear! It's not scary at all to join the community on Hello Kitty Online. There are lots of nice, helpful, fun people who can't wait to be your friend. Hello Kitty Online's forum moderators have instituted a positive posting policy. The guidelines are written to make sure that everyone is nice to each other and new members feel safe and secure posting to the website. If you're interested in posting on the Hello Kitty Online forums, make sure you follow these guidelines that were posted by Ishida:
