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You say that like it"s a bad thing. It sounds fantastic to me.

You can read R.A. Salvatore and post on MMORPG forums without being a dork? News to me.

Is there any recent accurate data on gender distribution in WoW? I"m not really convinced that female gamers make up a big enough segment of the market that attracting women will actually make or break your game.

Wow, that"s damn true.

That really is true for a lot of things, though. You just have to set a standard of quality and be happy about it when you get there. Is the game fun? Do you have the stuff you wanted to have, and if you"re missing some things that might take a long time, will you be able to patch them in later...

That doesn"t make any sense to me. Suppose a game takes X man-hours for your team to complete. (Of course, X is a mystery in advance.) That X won"t be any smaller if you"re working 60-hour weeks instead of 40-hour weeks, right? It"ll just take 50% more days to finish with 40-hour weeks. I think...

Oh yeah. I forgot he was part of Escapist -- that pretty much explains that. I was just thinking of their magazine bits.

I"d have thought more people read these forums than readThe Escapist.

Suppose this were technically possible. What would be the point? How is it a game anymore? If it *were* a game, people would just catalog the optimal ways to use all the objects to accomplish whatever the game objective is, and then nobody would do very much other than that. (Except...

Public quests. Those were hella fun in Warhammer while it was new (i.e. when people were actually doing them.) Need some refinement, but a fantastic idea.

They"re not cool because they"re grey -- I think you might be muddling me up with another poster, which is understandable. They"re cool as opposed to their functional equivalent, raw coin, since they add a tiny little bit of variety. The hassle is the only downside, and it is a hassle. I"m...

Did you quote the wrong post? This makes no sense. Anyway, grey items are a little cool. It"s neat to have some tiny bit of flavor in the loot you get from everyday mobs. It"s just the hassle that isn"t cool, right? So if you don"t want to have unlimited bag space -- why not at least have...

Why does my inventory have a size? Besides roleplaying reasons. Isn"t it just nothing but frustration?

No, I agree. This is exactly what I meant. A whole lot of people are just playing because they want to be the top of their class and get the best gear. That goal doesn"t have much to do with lore and quest text, and when content "gets in the way" of their work to become the best (like when they...

Just take away the carrot. Find a way to make an MMORPG where the Single Solitary Important Thing in the game isn"t primarily getting max level, and people won"t speed through your content to get to max level. As-is, a big chunk of the population of WoW isn"t playing because of sweet quests...

Frankly, if I look cool, and the guy I"m fighting against at the moment looks cool, the other people around me can be shadows or wireframes for all I care.

You really can. WoW wasn"t rock-solid when it launched by any standards; I don"t think we need to have a point-by-point argument here. It wasgreatby MMORPG standards, and OK by big-pieces-of-software standards, and it was solid enough to be fun. But it sure wasn"t rock-solid, and there"s plenty...

That"s true and it"s a good point. Perhaps a big game with polished voice tools or in-game guild scheduling/coordination tools from release would see those tools become really standard.

That"s true, especially if they retain interoperability with the generic application; for example, if your in-game guild voice chat could be bound to an externally accessible Ventrilo channel on your server. However, that"s not the way things have gone in WoW or EVE (the games I have personal...

Why do you want to do these things? Games keep writing their own voice chat systems, and everyone uses Ventrilo or TS, since those programs are mature and inevitably better with more features. Games write their own mail systems and their own message posts, and if you actually want to get in...

No, it doesn"t. What are you talking about?

It seems like that from this armchair I"m sitting in, too, but look at the facts: there have been many MMORPGs over the years. The people writing them haven"t all been incompetent, and they all know that more interesting content (especially early-game content, where you do indeed see the...

You can"t please all the people all the time. Either they neglect early content, they neglect endgame content, they neglect raids, they neglect PvP, or they spend years polishing them all and then someone complains because the release cycle isn"t fast enough.

I never quite figured out why in most fantasy raiding MMOs there are usually just two sizes of dungeons: small ones with X people (where 3 < X < 7) and large ones for Y people (where 20 < Y < 50). Why aren"t there dungeons for all the numbers in between and on either end?

How many MMORPGs have been produced? 90% ofeverythingis shit, and games are no exception. There are less MMOs than other games, since it requires more money and commitment, and as a result there are less good ones.

A mix would definitely be cool. I like EVE"s system since I can take a break for a week and my character has progressed when I come back, but it"s also nice to be able to sit down at the game for a weekend and get something done faster.

The problem of having a lot of people with tons of cash is really hard to solve. There are two ways to attack it; prevent people from amassing tons of cash, or give them things to spend tons of cash on. Preventing them from amassing it is really tough provided that your game has an...

Maybe, but I think that MMORPGs are really in their infancy, and as a result the difference between the good ones and bad ones in terms of quality is so huge that nobody is making decisions based on price. In my (limited) experience, people play the good games, and they play what their friends...

I don"t understand why Blizzard, as a company, would embrace different payment options like that. Consider: - It makes no difference to Blizzard"s bottom line whether you play BGs, arenas, raids, or just go farm gold. The only things they care about is whether you"re subscribed and perhaps...

Well, you can buy timecards with cash at the usual rate at different retailers, like 15 bucks for a one-month timecard with a unique code on it that you enter. Then, CCP makes a barter forum and secure web interface (scam-proof, and you can use it even if your account is inactive) for folks to...

EVE"s "free" play is clever; it harnesses the RMT market to actually do something nice for players.

Well, here"s the thing: Housing is just territory. It"s silly to talk about housing being "meaningful" in a PvE game. How can a house be meaningful in a large world unless you"re attacking or defending it? You get trophies? You know that if the game"s popular, a thousand other people will...

Well, I might be a spoonfed, douchebag, E-thug, half-a-faggot bitch, but you"re a piece of shit.

It"s a fair point. WoW has done a good job at making long-lasting PvP content in the form of some good game types and lots of long-term gear rewards from PvP. But at the same time, if you count up man-hours of design and development, holy shit! How much more work have they done on PvE than PvP...

Says you, but a ton of the games on the market focus on one at the expense of the other. FFXI? EQ? EQ2? LOTRO? Vanguard? Totally PvE, with PvP being tacked on, if present at all. Guild Wars? EVE? DAOC? Shadowbane? POTBS? Totally PvP, with a little bit of PvE to do when you get beaten up. WoW...

You bet your ass it is. You"re both playing a game; your objective is to beat the shit out of some newbie, and their objective is to get away from you and/or get whatever they were trying to do done without getting killed. Your objectives are at cross-purposes, and how you play the game...

The thing is, they don"t have to go elsewhere, if the other options are no good. I like lots of multiplayer games. I played vanilla WoW for a year and a bit as a near-top-end raider (I did lots of PvP and battlegrounds too, but I was playing it primarily to raid and then just PvPing to blow off...

It"s a prediction that there"s a PvP game which is scalable and polished enough to hold those players; better than Guild Wars, EVE, and many other smaller MMORPGs which are quite decent games appealing to a PvP audience. I think it"s a pretty dicey proposition to say that WAR or AOC is going to...

Crash to 2 million, then? 1 million? (Fat chance.) I"d point out that that still beats the shit out of the subscription count of every single PvP-centric MMORPG ever released. Is a PvE MMORPG that "only" has 2 million subscribers a failure? WAR and AOC would become king? Seeing as they don"t...

Well, that"s competing with other players, too, isn"t it? I"m just saying, you"ll get some funny looks from me if you"re claiming that"s "not PvP", and you"ll get funny looks from five million arena players if you"re claiming WoW arenas "aren"t PvP." People agree that what they mean by PvP...