World of Warcraft: Legion and Blizzard’s recent decisions were at the forefront of a couple of recent MMO blog posts as of late, their authors noting how the studio cannot easily react to community objections or bad development choices.
Alternative Chat used the issue of Rogues protesting the lack of Ravenholdt as their class base to show that the studio can’t adjust on the fly: “What’s abundantly apparent however is that Blizzard isn’t for turning. This is not up for discussion. The problem here is that this makes [the] objection seem completely redundant, and that’s just wrong.”
Gamer By Design followed that post up by talking about why Blizzard lacks the ability to turn quickly: “Having a deep pipeline means less downtime due to waiting on others; you’re almost always busy, which is good from a financial and throughput perspective. But having a deep pipeline also means you’re very much not agile.”
Marching on with today’s round-up of community blog posts, we have a loving retrospective of Lord of the Rings Online, a debate about factions, a look at in-game holidays, and more!
As a LOTRO server closes down, Ravalation counts down her top 10 favorite memories from her adventures on the shard. One such event? A spontaneous goat parade.
“Then there were those other silly Gilrain moments,” Rav writes. “Sometimes they emerged out of nowhere. Here someone started a train of goats parading through the 21st Hall. People passing by jumped on their goats and /followed along. I think it went on for an hour or so.”
Inventory Full: The race goes to the swift
Believe it or not, the “holy trinity” didn’t always include DPS. In this post, Bhagpuss explains how damage-dealers fit into the old paradigm in games like EverQuest.
“Everyone just had so many more important things to think about and so many more interesting options. There was so much to do in those days. Really, who would want to play pure DPS? Even most of the Wizards had probably rolled that way for ports. The long list of key tasks, all of which featured well ahead of just inflicting damage, included but was by no means limited to tanking, healing, slowing, hasting, pulling, crowd control, mana replenishment, buffing, debuffing, and, of course, rezzing.”
Rambling Thoughts About WoW: Holidays are full of traditions
Longtime World of Warcraft veteran Marathal recently realized that he’s outgrown the same-old holiday events: “I sat there last night watching people doing the ram racing. Recalling all the times I did it outside of Ironforge those first years I played. Traveling the world for quest to collect tokens to buy pets or holiday garb for achievements. I’ve done all of them, on both factions. And it was fun the first times. But now for me it feels like one of those family traditions I have grown away from.”
Tales of the Aggronaut: Better faction systems
Belghast is not happy with the direction that factions have taken in MMOs, and he’s not afraid to complain about it.
“The problem is that I feel no personal responsibility for choosing Horde or Alliance or in many cases Red or Blue,” Belghast writes. “They don’t represent me as a person, and as such I have no real loyalty tied to them. However in EverQuest you were assigned essentially a default template of allegiances based on your racial choice… but from that point on you could blur the lines at will.”
Telwyn does a bit of compare-and-contrast between two similar systems: Star Trek Online’s duty officers and World of Warcraft’s garrison followers. So what’s the verdict?
“All in all both systems add something extra to their respective games. They offer a reason to login to the respective game even if time is limited, but I would say neither is so absorbing that they alone would be a reason to keep playing if my interest in the actual content were to wane.”
Curious about what life is like in A Tale in the Desert? Joseph’s been providing a play-by-play as he explores the final days of the current “telling,” sharing screenshots and stories from his adventures.
“Since the Sixth Telling is drawing to a close, the game has gone truly F2P giving me the chance to try it out for myself! Obviously for some this is very old news, but it still might be interesting to those who haven’t experienced ATITD for themselves.”
Every day there are tons of terrific, insightful, and unusual articles posted across the MMO gaming blogosphere — and every day, Justin reads as many as he can. Global Chat is a sampling of noteworthy essays, rants, and guides from the past few weeks of MMO discourse.
