With Elder Scrolls Online’s new housing system coming early next month and LOTRO testing out some much-needed housing improvements, homemaking seems to be a subject on the mind of many players these days.
Contains Moderate Peril says that MMO housing has yet to live up to potential: “What you can do with housing is a far more interesting talking point. At present housing mainly offers in the MMO genre additional storage, an opportunity for aesthetic customisation, and convenient support services […] What housing across most MMOs fails to do is offer any additional social facilities or unique group content.”
Meanwhile, Dimension Gallery featured one house designer that came up with some impressive dimensions (my favorite is the Spongebob Squarepants!).
Housing not your thing? After the break we have blog essays on Final Fantasy XIV, welfare epics, and the true endgame activity of MMORPGs!
Aywren Sojourner:Â FFXIV — Quick guide to better full-body screenshots
“After changing into a taller race in FFXIV, I realized quickly that taking a good full-body screenshot is far more difficult. If you’re playing a shorter race, like Lalafell, this is a non-issue. But even when I was playing my kitty, I often found scrolling out to get a full-outfit shot wasn’t the best.”
Psychochild’s Blog: The real endgame? Appearance.
“It’s easy to see why appearance systems are so popular. This is the ultimate example of character customization, allowing the player to make the character look exactly as they want. Character customization has always been a big part of MMOs, allowing a player to make a distinctive character. Yet, how is that character distinctive if it’s hidden behind armor that everyone else is wearing?”
Tales of the Aggronaut: Welfare epics
“In Wrath of the Lich King, the end bosses of the various heroic dungeons had a chance of dropping a much rarer epic quality item… and these were called Welfare Epics.  It simply became a way of one segment of the population diminishing the achievements of another segment of the population […] Where it frustrates me the most however is that it generates this sense that MMOs are a zero-sum game.  It creates the fallacy that if I am getting ahead, you are falling behind.”
MMO Gypsy: So have you heard about Ashes of Creation?
“It’s the one million question: How is your MMORPG different from those that came before it? Considering how 99% of all MMOs start their player journeys the same way, the above statement is great news! Maybe Ashes of Creation will be the first title to really tell a story from the other end — from a world of destruction and desolation that’s waiting for players to rebuild and heal the land.”
Superior Realities: Things I have never done in WoW
“I just don’t like Gnomes. They’re a comedy relief race that isn’t funny. They’d work fine as some background element like the Grummles in Pandaria, but Blizzard’s half-hearted attempts to make them a race worthy of sharing center stage have just created an unhappy medium where they’re still not terribly compelling as heroes but have also lost whatever quirky charm they once had.”
Ravalation: Lost in translation — why my friends don’t understand me when I talk about MMOs
“Interesting to note is that my friends don’t appreciate us talking about online games. I imagine because they feel excluded. Because we have nice friends they don’t tell us to shut up, but you can tell from their body language. (The yawns are kind of a giveaway.) So I try to not talk about our online adventures (that are as real to us as anything we do together) in front of our friends.”
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.
