One Shots: Toy chests

Really, when you think about it, MMOs are our grown-up toy chests. They have all of these attractive and fun toys to keep us occupied and happy as we pretend that we are heroes on great adventures while making a pit stop to play Barbie’s dream house. And that’s OK — we need to blow off steam and relax somehow, and this beats HALO jumping in the safety department.

This week, the Massively OP readership was all-too-eager to show off the toys within their toy chests, starting with Hirku’s trip to an amusement park. In a theme park MMO. There are layers upon layers of meta in today’s column, folks!

“World of Warcraft’s Darkmoon Faire is my favorite toy, and this week I get to play!” Hirku posted. “Wheeee!”

Yeoman JonBuck thinks that the best toy in the galaxy… is himself!

“Here is one from Star Trek Online (of course). This is from the Shard of Possibilities device. When you’re in battle, you get help from two alternate versions of yourself. If you’re not in battle, they dance.”

When will we get a Star Trek series that is only about dancing? Dancing through space to win hearts? That seems better than what we’re getting these days.

Hurbster didn’t need much prompting to break out his favorite little trinkets and knick knaks in Elder Scrolls Online. I’m kind of worried that, by the look of it, they are turning her evil. Maybe she should have read the fine print on the packaging?

Zulika Mi-Nam has an “old man rant” for you today. Settle in, kiddos.

“I have not found anything useless worth keeping in modern games. Back in the Asheron’s Call days, though, you could make a little note on any item you wanted. Sometimes a patron would inscribe an item with either a phrase that was either funny or had RP relevance before passing it on to an vassal. As you can see below, we would also copy paste quotes of things people said in chat to remember and show others.

“Just another instance of players creating their own content. A process of coding knowledge known only to the ancients was needed for this, which has now been lost though the passage of time.”

“Probably one of the most favorite “useless” toys I have across most of my games is the holocom emote in Star Wars: The Old Republic,” said Toy Clown. “As a roleplayer, I use the excuse of a comm coming through in-character when I need to go AFK, and I park the character on the outskirts of the RP action, and no one bothers her because she’s on a comm. It has absolutely no value in a gameplay sense!”

For this week’s screenshot, I would love to see any caps that you have of where the game’s landscape meets the sky. The contrast of the two can often be really provoking, especially when there is little in the way to block it. Good hunting!