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The Daily Grind: How do you define MMO expertise?
MMO expertise is hard to define nowadays. See, back when there were three or four titles in the genre, it was easy (if time-consuming) to style yourself as an expert. In 2013, there's a new MMO released every other week, and so it's quite challenging to keep track of them all, let alone play more than a handful at a time or know a title's mechanics inside and out. Massively's writers and livestreamers are mostly generalists, with a couple of exceptions, meaning that we play a huge variety of games at the cost of knowing everything there is to know about one or two of them. What about you, comment crew? Do you consider yourself an expert on certain titles or on the genre as a whole? How do you define MMO expertise? 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!
GOG sale: Krondorian betrayals, masquerades, steamworks and magick obscura
GOG's weekend sale caters to those who appreciate substantial, fantastic heft -- enough to sustain a novelization or two. The download service is offering a 30 percent discount on four Activision-published RPGs, including Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (pictured) at $4.19, and the Feist-fueled Betrayal at Krondor Pack, which includes an additional betrayal in Antara for $4.19. The same discounted price also applies to Return to Krondor, a divisive sequel that spent years in tumultuous development, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption, Nihilistic Software's flawed take on the pen-and-paper RPG of the same name. The connection between Arcanum and Vampire? Arcanum's now-defunct developer Troika went on to finish Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines in 2004, notably becoming one of the first developers to utilize Valve's Source engine. (Unfortunately, the vampires weren't nearly as draining as the bugs.)
Double-plus good: Luna Online expansion heading to test servers December 24th
And now for a public service announcement from your friends at Massively. Are you suffering from a severe cute deficiency in your MMO diet? Then you may want to consider Luna Online, which has 400% of the recommended daily allowance of big eyes, oversized heads and giggly animals. To make your Luna Online life even better, gPotato has announced that the new expansion for the game, Luna Plus, is hitting the public test servers from December 24th through January 7th. Testers will be able to preview all of the new content and zones, including a 30-level increase (to the new level 150 cap), an additional race, a castle siege and seven previously unexplored areas. If that's not enough, Luna Plus will feature eight-person mounts, such as a giant snail. We just hope you and your party don't want to get anywhere in a pressing hurry. Luna Online players have a lot to look forward to with this first expansion, especially with the ability to get their hands on it even earlier. For more information, ask your local librarian or head over to Luna Online. The more you know -- and knowing is half the battle.
Multitasking in iOS 4 is not a magical sparkle pony
As we wait for iOS4 to be released, I think it's important to try to help folks keep reasonable expectations for what iOS 4 will and won't do, especially as it relates to "multitasking." Apple has to take some of the blame for this hype, especially when it's listed as the #1 feature of iOS 4, saying "Now you can run your favorite third-party apps - and switch between them instantly - without slowing down the performance of the foreground app or draining the battery unnecessarily."1 Did you notice that 1? The big print giveth and the little print taketh away. Down at the bottom of the page, Apple tells you that multitasking is "available with apps that have been developed to work with iOS 4." That means that any app that isn't tweaked to be multitasking-aware simply won't play nice with the feature. And even that isn't the whole truth. Read on for more...
