advice
Latest
Ask Massively: Misconceptions about game criticism, free-to-play, and lazy scrubs
In previous editions of Ask Massively, we've covered misconceptions about new, old, and sunsetted MMOs as well as misconceptions about jerk players, Kickstarters, and untrustworthy studios. Let's tackle a few more this week: who gets to dish out criticism, what F2P portends for a game, and which MMO generation really has the most lazy scrubs (answer: all of them).
WildStar tips for every player
Do you know the fine points of dyeing gear in WildStar? Did you know that interrupting enemies grants you a damage bonus? Are you aware that you can get all the benefits of your gear while being absolutely naked? All of these things are true, and a new video by WOBO just past the break takes a few minutes to point out all of the tips, tricks, and other fine points that you might not have noticed while playing the game. Sure, some of these are probably familiar to players who have been in the game for a while, but some of them (like the bonus interrupt damage) might be new even to players who have been in since the earlier beta phases. Jump on past the break for the full video!
Ask Massively: Misconceptions about jerk players, Kickstarters, and untrustworthy studios
Continuing our miniseries theme from the last Ask Massively, today's edition will focus on a brand-new set of misconceptions commonly held by MMO gamers and participants in our comments section: jerk players in MMORPGs, the playerbase of one particular sci-fi sandbox, Kickstarters vs. investments, and learning to trust a studio that's done you wrong. As always, if there's a misconception you want me to add to my list, let me know in the comments!
The Nexus Telegraph: Preparing for WildStar's launch
When you read this, dear reader, you will be less than two weeks away from early access to WildStar. Unless you've come here just to let everyone know you don't want to play the game, in which case you might want to find slightly more joyous hobbies? Just a thought. The obvious thing to do pre-launch, of course, is to reserve your name, but that didn't work out for everyone so well, and I'm betting that if you were going to do that by now, you would have done it. (Still have a little time if you haven't, though.) What else can you do? Open beta is over. It's just getting into the meat of the game and maybe taking a day or two off of work first, right? Obviously not; there's more stuff you can do to prep yourself for the launch psychologically and otherwise. So step into my metaphorical office, and I'll give you some suggestions about things to do before the game starts and once early access kicks off.
Ask Massively: Misconceptions about new, old, and sunsetted MMOs
As the editor-in-chief of Massively, I make it a point to read as many of our comments as I can. We have some really smart people here chatting at the bottom of our posts, and I learn a lot from them. But I also see the same illogical statements and easily countered arguments being made independently by different commenters across many different threads and games. I'd like to address some of those misconceptions today in the first part of a new Ask Massively miniseries. Today's misconceptions are all about new, old, and sunsetted MMOs.
Ask Massively: Newsletters, EVE Online, and the value of alpha previews
Welcome back to a grab-bag edition of Ask Massively. First up is reader Roy, who asked, Do you have any kind of newsletter or weekly email on this site? Nope, no newsletter or email blasts! But there are lots of easy ways to follow our work. If you want the whole shebang, you can follow us through your RSS reader of choice as well as several social media avenues, all outlined in an Ask Massively from last year. If you want just a summary of our best stuff, you could follow just our Week in Review column, which runs every Sunday evening and might just serve your desire for a weekly summary of cool posts. We also publish weekly roundups of MMO in beta testing, crowdfunded MMOs, and pseudo-MMOs, including coverage of some games we don't traditionally cover separately. What else have we got this week? How about an internet spaceships question from Gabe.
Ask Massively: What's with all the WoW hate?
Today's Ask Massively question comes from Kirk because he wanted to open up a can of worms all over the column apparently. Why do people have to hate on World of Warcraft so much? I quit playing WoW about two years ago and never looked back, but that game encompassed the best gaming experience of my life! Now everyone wants to say its crap. But I have roamed the landscape without a real home for gaming; nothing has ever been as much fun as WoW. What person who plays MMOs didn't play Warcraft? How many of us had a great time in that game at some point? Can't we just leave it at that? I look back and admire a game that brought even my wife to the MMO table! I have no hate, just love for a game that I no longer play, and I think that's OK. Can we all move on now? What is the hold up? Let people who play WoW play WoW, and everyone else can play the game of his or her choice. Why does every chat panel in every game need to have the WoW topic constantly flowing through its veins? Honestly, I'm tired of it. Let's move on already! Because hating is fun! No, wait, that's true, but there's so much more to it than that.
Ask Massively: What happened to open-world MMOs?
A reader named Gabe emailed Massively last year with two questions (I'm getting through all the emails -- I am!). I'll address the second one eventually, but let's do the first one today because it's something I love to talk about: open-world MMOs. What happened to "open world" MMOs? I grew up with giant world MMOs where you would almost never see a load screen. I remember spending countless hours running from end to end of continents exploring and trying to see what I could find. You would run into a city instead of loading a city. I don't feel I am a part of a "world" anymore. After World of Warcraft, I played The Secret World, Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, and a few other closed-world MMOs, and it just pisses me off because I feel as if I am playing a single-player game with multiplayer options instead of a world I am a part of. I think we've got two separate issues here: One's about the literal meaning of open world, and the other's about the feel.
Ask Massively: Too many MMOs still lack serious LFG tools
David is angry. No, David is pissed. And he's right to be. He wrote to Ask Massively with the following rant: Developers clearly see PvE instances as a key part of the MMO experience. So why do so many of them fail to ensure I can access this content with a solid group finder? I have been trying to play something other than World of Warcraft (which does have a group finder) for a number of years. But even my current pick, The Secret World, commits this sin. I usually end up annoyed at spending time in LFG channels trying to form a group, so I give up, first on grouping and then on the game. So why do they design games where they assume I am joining the game with four like-minded individuals who have the same gaming schedule as I do? Why do they assume I want to spend time in public channels showing how little I know about the game whilst trying to form a group? Don't make me go back to WoW. Unless I can access your content, there is no point in making the content! I have a theory, but you're not going to like it, and you might end up back in WoW when I'm done.
Ask Massively: And the money will follow
A reader named Josh recently wrote to Massively to ask about the viability of a career in games journalism. He's not a kid with stars in his eyes; he's an adult who works for an elite tech company, and his dad is a published journalist himself. He once focused his MMO hobby into a livestreaming channel and blog but shut them down because of the time involved, and now he's considering whether a career shift to doing what he loves might be worthwhile. As a 30-year old with a family of three, I have a feeling that it would be very difficult to transition into the world of technology journalism. My impression is that it is an industry that does not really pay that much, and therein lies my quandary. My question for you at Massively is whether it is really possible to pursue the field of technology/gaming journalism and still support a family? And what traits are desirable in a technology journalist? Do editors look for people who have journalism degrees and existing experience, or is it a situation where you can step up to the plate and impress someone with your existing skill? How many of you that work for Massively actually support yourselves and your families based on your journalism, and what did it take to get to that point in your careers? Unfortunately, Josh's gut feeling is correct and terribly timely.
The best of Massively's Guild Counsel column
Karen Bryan is a seasoned MMORPG gamer and guildleader who cut her MMO teeth on EverQuest and went on to run guilds in Vanguard, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and beyond. That made her the perfect choice to pen Massively's Guild Counsel column, through which Karen dispensed advice to guild leaders, guild members, raiders, and even guild-less gamers for over three years. In honor of her column's long run, today we round up the very best of her Guild Counsel articles, those saturated in her trademark wry humor, wisdom, and timeless advice for MMO players old and new. Enjoy.
The Mog Log: Making the most of Final Fantasy XIV macros
Final Fantasy XIV is not World of Warcraft. We are not in urgent need of an ability squish after years of play; you hit level 50 with a pretty reasonable number of abilities. The fact that everything needs to be workable on a PlayStation 3 controller helps discourage button bloat, to boot. But you still wind up with a lot of abilities to use in rapid conjunction and marks to place on various targets as a tank. You can run out of convenient space, in other words. That's one of the things that macros can help address, but it's not even close to the only thing. You can use your macros to make your rotation tighter, you can combine necessary abilities, you can mark targets, and you can even toss in a text line on every ability use. (But that does get kind of spam-heavy.) So let's look at some simple macros that will make your Final Fantasy XIV experience that much cleaner.
Drama Mamas: When being female is a problem
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. Sometimes it just feels safer to hide your gender in game when you are female. Hi, I have noticed the last few years getting worse, or that I am just on the wrong realm. That if a guild has a female player in it, once the members find out, their hormones starts to act up. This way I am still more closing up against giving details about me, even if I am still being who I am, I just started to refuse answering questions like what is your realname. (which is commonly asked). They hardly ask for gender, but that comes because they hardly met a girl in WoW (possibly because some are doing the same as me) I guess.. So everyone is male unless proven otherwise. I have no problem with that, however if I prove otherwise, their hormones starts to act up and not sure what happens in this guild, but it will highly end up like most of my last guilds, being driven away from the guild by pestering.
Looking for Guild: In preparation for Wildstar
So I guess people are pretty excited about WildStar. Once again, all entries for this LFG column consist entirely of players looking for a guild in the upcoming WildStar, and they may just have the right idea. If you're a guild leader looking to populate your guild with the smartest and possibly best-looking readers of the best MMO blogsite in the universe, you've come to the right place. Follow along after the jump for the complete list of players looking to catch the early guild train in WildStar.
Storyboard: Manipulative tricks
Playing a manipulative character is kind of a minefield because you wind up falling into one of two traps. The first possibility is that you wind up not being very good at it because you aren't very manipulative. This isn't a mark against you, as none of the hallmarks of manipulation is thought of as a positive trait, but it does make your portrayal somewhat suspect. On the other hand, maybe you're great at manipulating the people around you, which starts to blur the lines between players and characters and raises some uncomfortable questions all around. So that's not fun either. Not that any of this tends to dissuade people; we love watching manipulative people, and the idea of playing one is appealing. It's a chance to make everyone dance to your tune, after all, even if it's just for a little while. So let's take a look at how you can play a manipulative character to the fullest without hurt feelings or informed traits.
The Guild Counsel: What do you need to be a guild leader?
The other day, I came across one of those inspirational posters that takes a word and then uses each letter to spell out a quality that makes up the word. And it got me thinking about what words best describe the essence of a good guild leader. There are as many different types of guild leaders as there are grains of sand on a beach, and many of them are successful. But if you took all of the longtime guild leaders and deconstructed them, what qualities would they all share? Let's look at the most essential qualities of a guild leader in this week's Guild Counsel.
Ask Massively: Why we cover what we do, part three
For this week's Ask Massively, longtime reader Avaera has asked us to do another round of "why we cover what we do," and I am happy to oblige. Avaera wrote, Can I ask (with what I hope is genuine curiosity) what guidelines you generally try to follow when choosing which news stories to cover? I do understand that it just isn't feasible to cover every update, patch, developer's announcement, press release, expansion, research paper, Kickstarter project, or success/failure story relating to the thousands of MMORPGs out there, but sometimes the criteria seem opaque to me. As an example, since the start of 2014, I counted 22 news articles exclusively focused on Brad McQuaid's Pantheon Kickstarter. In contrast, the active and available MMOs that I am most interested in don't seem to make much of a splash at all. Is this just a reflection of the gaming community's hunger for something new and original, of hype and promises being much more satisfying and desirable than the tangible and playable worlds from which the curtain of hopes and dreams has been stripped away? Is it a reflection of the personal interests of the Massively team, who certainly can't be expected to take up much time with games that simply don't do anything for them? Or is there something unfortunate about the gaming media that unknowingly feeds the hype and disappointment cycle through disproportionate reporting of developer plans and marketing over actual development? Complicated questions demand complicated answers. What do we consider when deciding whether something is newsworthy?
Drama Mamas: Where a kid can be a kid
Those crazy kids ... We sure hear a lot of frustrated cries for them to get off our Azerothian lawns. The usual scenario: The son or daughter of a relative or friend takes up playing the game. She's a great kid and all, and you're happy to make the occasional dungeon run with her -- it's just that every one of those evenings ends up as an exercise in frustration. She's late to meeting spots. She goes AFK in the middle of dungeon run. And she pesters you endlessly whenever you're in a raid: "Are you done yet? What are you killing now? Why did you wipe? Are you going to try again? Is everybody mad? Are you done yet?" Is there a way to keep sharing the occasional fun session with this young player without opening yourself up to a barrage of inconveniences? How can you handle this sticky situation without alienating your relative or friend?
Storyboard: Skipping scenes
There are certain bits of roleplaying that I like to think of as mechanical. They're there, they're necessary, but they're not terribly interesting. They're like random battles in Bravely Default: kind of neat the first time, altogether forgettable all subsequent times, and never blessed with an abundance of fascinating stuff. You need to get through them, but you can't really look forward to them any more than you can look forward to the most routine-filled parts of your day. So the best bet is to say they happened without acting them out. Yes, I'm saying there are bits of roleplaying that are best acted out only in reference. And I'm not just talking about your characters' bathroom visits; I'm talking about things like dates and shared experiences. So when is it actually an advantage to roleplay by not actually roleplaying at all? How do you determine the scenes that you know happened and are important but aren't important enough for you to actually play them out?
The Guild Counsel: How to find a good pre-launch guild
There's a wave of new MMOs on the horizon, and with each one comes a surge of enthusiastic fans ready for launch day. Some are so excited that they want to hit the ground running by joining a guild before the game goes live. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of pre-launch guilds for each upcoming game, and joining one early can help get the most out of a game from day one. But it's hard to find the right guild when you can't really see it in action. How do you know whether the guild you join will end up being the best fit for you? Let's look at how to link up with the best pre-launch guild in this week's Guild Counsel.
