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The Daily Grind: If you could play another race, what would it be?
Whether it be Lord of the Rings Online's four, Warhammer Online's seven or EverQuest II's whopping 19, sometimes MMOs never quite have the race you really want to play. Although race selection is often overshadowed by class picks, a character's race is still quite important to most players. Whether it be the aesthetic style, the implied attitude or the inherited place in the world, a race matters. Yet there usually comes a point where the mind starts to wander over to the forbidden valley and dabble in the "What if?" of racial choices. Maybe there's a race/class combination that's forbidden in your game, and you're denied your favorite race just because you are in love with a class. Or perhaps there's a race that you've encountered in your journeys that you think would be a popular player pick if only the devs would return your phone calls. So if you could play another race in your MMO, what would it be? Would you love to be a giant, towering above all others and crushing your foes with impunity? Would you like to be a monster that looks more terrifying than anything else you might encounter? Or have you latched onto the idea of being a cyborg zombie -- Zomborg, they're called? Speak up, sonny -- I can't hear you! 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: Create-a-Server
In this day and age, it seems as though servers have checked their creativity at the doors. PvE, PvP, RP, RP-PvP come as standard as red, green, blue and yellow in a Crayon four-pack. Hey, if it ain't broke, right? These four server rulesets do their job admirably, and for most people, that's good enough. It's almost easy to forget that devs have the ability to create rulesets that strike out in different directions, such as permadeath servers (oh yes, I went there) and progression servers (where a server resets to the core game, with expansions added at a steady pace). Of course, on rare occasion you do see a game experiment with unusual rulesets, such as EverQuest's 51/50 server. More recently, Realtime Worlds announced that they're contemplating a slew of unique rulesets for APB, including newbie, Chaos and pure skill. So the potential is there for servers to branch out -- it's just that, for various reasons, the risk is seen as not worth the potential reward. But this is The Daily Grind, a place to unleash your imagination and engage the "What if?" in its full glory. So if you could create a unique ruleset server for your game, what would it entail?
What if...? Ten canceled MMOs that could've changed history
What if...? Some of the most intriguing questions known to mankind start with those two words, as well as the most maddening. What if...? An entire genre known as "alternate history" is derived from these questions, with scholars and average blokes alike speculating on what might have happened if things went just a little differently. What if Hitler got the bomb first? What if Microsoft developed the iPod instead of Apple? What if Abraham Lincoln decided to see a different play that night? When it comes to MMORPGs, what if's can drive one up the wall. In this volatile genre, more projects have started, canceled, launched, struggled, faded and morphed into new creations than most of us know. Today, we want to look at 10 MMOs that were axed before their launch, 10 MMOs that could've changed gaming history as we know it... if only they got the chance to prove themselves. Let's take a journey, you and I, through history itself, and ponder the greatest of questions: How would the MMO industry be different if these titles had made it to release? Click the first picture on the gallery below to start. %Gallery-94702%
What If We Lost: An argument for losing a major lore-based battle
Warning: This article does contain spoilers for the Argent Coliseum Raid. If you want to be surprised, skip this article!There's a pretty long thread going on in the General Forums right now that makes an interesting request of the dev team: Let us lose. The argument goes that we've been sort of steamrolling our way through massive challenges and insurmountable odds pretty much the whole raid game, and it's just getting boring. Nothing feels like a threat anymore. We know we're going to defeat it and move on. We need to shake things up.The more I think about it, the more I like it. Why not let us be on the losing side, at least for a few patches? The Lich King himself could use a bit of help in that vein, for sure. The early leveling game did manage to conjure up a few heart-stopping moments where Arthas "let us win," but when it was time to take that to the next level, it seems like Blizzard's sort of backed off and gone stale. Now, we're holding a Ren Faire on his front lawn while his scourge mostly mills around aimlessly and doesn't make more than a token attempt to do anything threatening.There would be no quicker way to get him to burst back on the scene by having him or one of his lieutenants deal us a devastating blow, one which we will find it hard to recover from.
U.S. electrical grid penetrated by spies, hackers, or something unfathomably more terrible (update: China responds)
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the electricity grid in the United States has been infiltrated by "cyperspies," in an attempt to map the infrastructure, leaving behind software that could pose potential threats in times of crisis. Quoting anonymous "current and former" national security officials, the report claims that the spies, hailing from China, Russia, and "other countries" have not attempted to do any damage, but that they could, and that these types of intrusions are on the rise. Officials are of course worried about the potential implications of such penetrations, noting that much of our infrastructure, including nuclear power plants and financial institutions, are at risk. Unfortunately for the WSJ and its Cold War-era headline, the article goes on to state that it's not really possible to know whether a particular attack is "government sponsored," or just the work of regular old hackers from those regions running amok in cyberspace. Additionally, spokespeople from the Russian and Chinese Embassies vehemently deny their respective governments involvement in any such work. The Wall Street Journal, of course, fails to point out the most obvious of explanations: it's aliens. Update: China has officially responded to the report. From a WSJ blog post: "The intrusion doesn't exist at all," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular press conference. "We hope that the concerned media will prudently deal with some groundless remarks, especially those concerning accusations against China." "I have also noticed that the U.S. White House had denied the media reports," she said.
Forum Post of the Day: If WoW ended in 24 hours...
The premise that Bugsy has put forth on the EU forums is fairly simple. If WoW were to shut down in 24 hours, what do you think you'd do with all the free time? Would you be going through WoW withdrawal, or would you suddenly develop a close and personal relationship with your (potentially neglected) chores? Many of the forum replies out there suggest gathering their guilds together and finding another game to go to. (I expected the Warhammer references, but was surprised to see EVE in there too.) Still others just said they'd sell their accounts as fast as they could, or head out and enjoy time in meat-space.As for me, if WoW were shutting down in 24 hours, I think I'd probably squeeze every last moment out of it. That would probably involve corpse-hopping as far as possible in Black Temple -- if only to say that I'd seen the inside of the place. (who cares about repair bills when the whole game is going to go away the next day?) From there, I'd jump on my guild's forums, put the plans into work for a full guild raid on [insert large theme park here] where we could all meet up for one hell of a weekend bash before we scatter to the MMO winds. (As I have an open EVE account currently, I pretty much know where my focus would shift to...)What would you do? Are there any MMOs on the horizon that you think your guild might jump to, or that you're really looking forward to? Would you return to the MMO/MUD you may have been playing before WoW came along? Or would you agree with some in the thread -- that WoW is the first and last of the genre you'd play? [Many thanks to our own Dan O'Halloran!]
