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DoraTheExplora Taft > Log the fuck in and get your friends in!  Ill be raffling plexes away at random to people if we get over 900 in our fleets.  Ill start off with 5 plexes and add an extra plex to each additional 50 pilots we get. -A TEST motivational technique in action The war […]

Blizzard sent me a promotional offer where they are offering everybody services like character transfers to other servers for half price. And that got me wondering where this is going. Fact is that...

Continuing further in Prime World: Defenders has answered some questions. Yes, the rarer towers are unambiguously better than the basic ones. Early on, my mostly upgraded wooden tower was boring but practical. As a great lover of DoTs, my fully upgraded poison tower is awesome yet practical, but the better towers are generally of the [...]

Prime Grind is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

MY PEOPLE: TEST is vowing to stand down and cede us J5A, leaving the first ‘battle’ of Fountain to us. Why? Of 900 online in their alliance, barely more than 300 are in Karan, their new lowsec staging point. Our response to this will be more sieging and flaying. TEST is vowing to return for […]

MY PEOPLE: TEST is vowing to stand down and cede us J5A, leaving the first ‘battle’ of Fountain to us. Why? Of 900 online in their alliance, barely more than 300 are in Karan, their new lowsec staging point. Our response to this will be more sieging and flaying. TEST is vowing to return for […]

My free time has come to mirror my work schedule: random and spontaneous. As a substitute, I don't work regular hours.  The day before yesterday was a split shift, the day after just 4 hours,...

I was keen to get down to the staging base for the was in Fountain.  So as soon as I could get into the game, I started looking for a convoy op that was headed down to B-DBYQ, the initial CFC base of operations for the war.  I remember the delopment to Delve last year […]

I was keen to get down to the staging base for the was in Fountain.  So as soon as I could get into the game, I started looking for a convoy op that was headed down to B-DBYQ, the initial CFC base of operations for the war.  I remember the delopment to Delve last year […]

Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian, when asked what is best in life, responded with the famous quote: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of...

A reader sent me a funny YouTube video on 300 Heroes, a Chinese game that not only blatantly rips off League of Legends, but then populates it with characters stolen from all sorts of other works, up...

I've written a lot about the importance of in-game community lately. But, allow me to write a bit about the type of community that isn't in a game or owned by a particular company. Maybe we can get draw some lessons that might come back around to game design. So, let's talk about blogging, and the community around that. As the title asks: where did the bloggers go?

Post copyright Brian 'Psychochild' Green. Visit the post to participate in the comments: The other online community: where did MMO bloggers go?

We’re going to war. This is a fact we can’t ignore. We’re going to war. In case you hadn’t heard before, I think they think we’re going to war. We’re going to war. I think they think we’re going to war. We’re going to war. We’re going to war. We’re going to war! The War […]

We’re going to war. This is a fact we can’t ignore. We’re going to war. In case you hadn’t heard before, I think they think we’re going to war. We’re going to war. I think they think we’re going to war. We’re going to war. We’re going to war. We’re going to war! The War […]

In writing yesterday’s post about TorilMUD I ended up reading through a bunch of older posts on the subject.  That always happens.  It is, frankly, one of the reasons I have a blog. One of the posts I ended up re-reading was from February 2011 about what I called the Commoditization of Roles. In that […]

In writing yesterday’s post about TorilMUD I ended up reading through a bunch of older posts on the subject.  That always happens.  It is, frankly, one of the reasons I have a blog. One of the posts I ended up re-reading was from February 2011 about what I called the Commoditization of Roles. In that […]

I'm on some newsletter mailing list from IGN, and they sent me a link to their review of The Last of Us, an upcoming PS3 game. They gave it a perfect 10.0 out of 10. Metacritic already has like 50...

Buried in the article describing how, rather than being sad about being laid off, most of Zynga New York (formerly OMGPOP) descended into deliriously happy bacchanalia, is this stray observation:

The primary problem with the concept of Permadeath in MMOs has always been in a vast disparity between the emotional connection that different kinds of players have towards their characters.

While I do not play TorilMUD any more, I do watch their for updates and remain interested in how the game continues to change and evolve nearly 20 years after I started playing its direct antecedent, Sojourn MUD. (Interesting that they distinguish the two now.) An update went out last week around some new changes […]

While I do not play TorilMUD any more, I do watch their for updates and remain interested in how the game continues to change and evolve nearly 20 years after I started playing its direct antecedent, Sojourn MUD. (Interesting that they distinguish the two now.) An update went out last week around some new changes […]

Stubborn has a great post up about Adult Themes. He says: "It seems that anything that’s considered “not appropriate for children,” must, then, be “adult themed,” but I’d like to propose a different...

Thanks to the help of a reader, I finally managed to get the Scrolls shop loading, and bought and installed the game. Not long afterwards I very much regretted that decision. I had expected so much...

Looked at in a vacuum, the Zynga layoffs may seem like just another game developer having standard game developer trouble, similar to the layoffs that Bioware, Blizzard, Rockstar, Midway, and countless

This article is significant, in that World of Tanks is considered the premier ‘pay to win’ success story in the North American market. The core basis of “free-to-win” is to

Where ArenaNet has hit the highest marks for their live-game updates, in my opinion, is where it affects community interaction. For content on its own, even good content such as the Cragstead instance, it’s neat, and then I move on. It is where the Living Story has changed the momentum of daily playing where I [...]

[GW2] Farming the Community is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

CCP reports that the Odyssey expansion has been successfully deployed. TQ is open for business ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to EVE Online: Odyssey! #tweetfleet #eveonline— CCP Fozzie (@CCP_Fozzie) June 04, 2013 I suppose one of the joys of EVE for people whole live on the West coast of the United States is that all this […]

CCP reports that the Odyssey expansion has been successfully deployed. TQ is open for business ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to EVE Online: Odyssey! #tweetfleet #eveonline— CCP Fozzie (@CCP_Fozzie) June 04, 2013 I suppose one of the joys of EVE for people whole live on the West coast of the United States is that all this […]

 Oh, what have I gotten myself into? I'm actually trying to play these three games: Marvel Heroes, an isometric third person action RPG with that is basically a re-skinned game in the Diablo...

Most tabletop games have some sort of symmetry where all players have the same role and resources in the game. Pen & paper roleplaying games (and some board games who borrowed the concept) work...

Servers are down on beta release day, of course. Well done, Mojang! Who would have thought that you could sell a beta of a trading card game / board game hybrid for $20 and get so much interest that...

I am about half-way through the campaign of Prime World: Defenders. It is tower defense with collectible card game elements, which sounds like a game designed for me. Tycho at Penny Arcade has similar gaming tastes, so his recommendation convinced me to pre-order before a really good sale. And hey, pre-ordering gives you a little [...]

Prime World: Defenders is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

…all microtransactions that sell game content also destroy equity. -Ramin Shokrizade, in his The Barrier to Big post Free to play, revenue models, and why some MMOs succeed while others fail remain hot topics in the MMO blogesphere, with a myriad of different opinions represented. One recent thread has been the impact on MMOs of […]

…all microtransactions that sell game content also destroy equity. -Ramin Shokrizade, in his The Barrier to Big post Free to play, revenue models, and why some MMOs succeed while others fail remain hot topics in the MMO blogesphere, with a myriad of different opinions represented. One recent thread has been the impact on MMOs of […]

First of all, it's "et al." (note the point after "al.", because that is an abbreviation of alii, but et is a full word), and not "et tal". Second, I accept (without necessarily agreeing) your...

It wasn’t even the new launcher’s fault this time. Saturday afternoon/evening my local time it was becoming difficult to log into EVE Online.  Rumors started to float about a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack First there was this At 02:05 GMT June 2nd, CCP became aware of a significant and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack […]

It wasn’t even the new launcher’s fault this time. Saturday afternoon/evening my local time it was becoming difficult to log into EVE Online.  Rumors started to float about a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack First there was this At 02:05 GMT June 2nd, CCP became aware of a significant and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack […]

I played Magic the Gathering for a decade and up to now that is the game I spent the most money on, in the order of $10,000 overall, a thousand dollars per year. And I wasn't even playing...

I've come across a review of Mechwarrior Online, and I was wondering whether it would be worth trying out. I'm not usually a fan of multiplayer shooters, but I love World of Tanks. So for me...

It’s now been about a week since XBox announced The One, including obliquely hinting that games will be locked to one console, and the entire Internet responded with rage not

One of the staples of near-future science fiction is organizations working in absolute secrecy to produce big game-changing innovation. I’ve been trying to come up with examples of this in the real world, but haven’t found any. A few examples from science fiction: (These are kind of spoilers, but not very good ones.) In Daniel [...]

If you are not in the games industry yet but hope to be, I beg of you one thing:  If you read this article and find yourself agreeing with the

The Site Aside from putting all of my banners in a post where I (and everybody else) can easily find them, general site related news has been pretty slim.  And after a month of record setting page views, things are back down to the level of mere mortals… and down a bit from even there.  […]

The Site Aside from putting all of my banners in a post where I (and everybody else) can easily find them, general site related news has been pretty slim.  And after a month of record setting page views, things are back down to the level of mere mortals… and down a bit from even there.  […]

Reblogged from Tish Tosh Tesh: This is my 600th post.  Seems like it ought to be an occasion of some sort.  So let's see... Dice, Rats and Dragons, Oh, My! Dice! I'm doing a Kickstarter campaign for my "Rusty Fudge" Tinker Dice and their siblings (I have the numbered designs, fudge designs and a lead […]

Reblogged from Tish Tosh Tesh: This is my 600th post.  Seems like it ought to be an occasion of some sort.  So let's see... Dice, Rats and Dragons, Oh, My! Dice! I'm doing a Kickstarter campaign for my "Rusty Fudge" Tinker Dice and their siblings (I have the numbered designs, fudge designs and a lead […]

These are a simple man’s thoughts that didn’t make it to full posts: Warframe is a really nice third-person shooter with some ninja-magic effects. The Canadian team seems to have a very good grasp of everything from updates to the cash shop to their technology. Things can get a little grindy, but it pretty much [...]

Thoughts Throughout a Rainy Week is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

“How many MMOs have been successful in the U.S.? Two. World of Warcraft and EverQuest. Kind of a bad slugging percentage.” Take-Two Interactive chairman Strauss Zelnick, arguing that MMOs don’t work in the West I am not sure what measure of success you would be using if you declared that the only two successful MMOs […]

“How many MMOs have been successful in the U.S.? Two. World of Warcraft and EverQuest. Kind of a bad slugging percentage.” Take-Two Interactive chairman Strauss Zelnick, arguing that MMOs don’t work in the West I am not sure what measure of success you would be using if you declared that the only two successful MMOs […]

Card Hunter is a game that requires very different skills than a MMORPG or MOBA game does, as it is a turn-based tactical game. So the player base is a different one. Nevertheless it turns out that...

I don't have much to say, as I largely wasted the last four days half-expecting that an appointment on Wednesday (yesterday) was going to result in me being the lucky 1:10,000th chance recipient of a...