design

BlizzCon 2018 was a pretty unnecessary disaster for Blizzard. It managed to demolish any hopes people had about Battle for Azeroth rounding the bend and...

There are two apparent truisms about scams in the MMO marketplace. The first is that players are quick to call anything that vaguely stinks...

So... this was honestly not the story that I had expected to have wound up coming out of Eternal Magic. I'd been expecting that "beauty...

Last week, we saw Blizzard explain its philosophy behind why some World of Warcraft bugs in which players got to get more stuff than...

The past few years have seen some really big seismic shifts in the game industry. In the time that I've been working here alone,...

Here's a fun question I asked myself a lot back in the day: Why, exactly, did leveling take so long in Final Fantasy XI? The obvious mechanical...

Here's the funny thing about communication from MMO studios: It's vital to the continued feeling of a healthy game, and yet at the same...

There's a contingent of players looking forward to the launch of World of Warcraft: Classic next week that is vocally thrilled about one specific...

The other night, I was reading the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit and came across that gem of all gems for people who love badly...

Here's a fun little trivia fact that you probably already know: Computers can't really do randomness. A random number is usually generated by pulling...

Look, you've probably heard this before, but it bears repeating now: Don't pre-order that game. Pre-ordering games is a bad idea. And this week,...

People who have read my work for a while know that I really like tabletop roleplaying, and I have copies of two of my...

So now that Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers has been released, basically everyone playing the game has completely forgotten that the expansion actually prompted some...

There are, at the time I write this, two basic approaches for getting new players up to speed in existing MMOs. Both of them...

I've been thinking a lot about esports lately. This is not actually something I like to think about, mind you; my general attitude toward esports...

Here's an interesting fact of trivia for you for today: I am pretty much clocked out when it comes to news about H1Z1. The game...

When you play Final Fantasy XIV, you are going to be stuck playing one of an assortment of jobs, with no actual customization to distinguish...

Recently, I've been trying to get into Bloodborne. This isn't a result of my disliking the Souls franchise as a whole, just that it's never...

Let me tell you about last year's NaNoWriMo project. If you've never taken part in National Novel Writing Month, it's a great reason to...

The community is not the MMO. That should be obvious. There is a game to League of Legends that exists without any of the toxic...