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They promised us at Blizzcon a starter experience for both new races "as great". I would expect, as a Worgen, that you will start as a human, get infected, which forces you to "switch sides" (you start friendly to humans, hostile to other worgen, then suddendly...), and so on. That"s why they...

The only game than went below 3 years was Dark Age of Camelot, and that was because Mythic reused heavily their existing designs and tech from previous games. (of course, when they launched, most dungeons were empty, with mob dropping only cash, not a single item). With the experience of...

And needs to convince X hundred thousands of buyers.

Do not mix jobs as well. Being the CEO means you make sure your company works. Being the game producer means you make sure your game works. Those are different jobs. She worked in the game industry for quite a long time. That means she knows the culture, the mindset, the specifics of the...

And that, I think, reflects an "elder game" mentality. Namely the fact that it"s highly probable that almost every new player in WoW today comes from being invited by someone. Granted, those someones usually make an alt to accompany their friends/family/colleagues in their levelling (even more...

There"s a big difference between random generation and procedural generation. Case in point: LDON/AO dungeons missions vs... EVE"s galaxy. EVE used procedural generation to create and populate their galaxy (cue in the geekish story of them stopping and restarting the process using a hardcoded...

There"s a big difference between "world changing" (the world changes, for you) and "world shaping" (you change the world, for everyone). One is relatively easy, the other is horribly hard to do well (and an enormous uneconomical proposition in terms of dev hours, usually).

Hey, it"s Cuppy"s fault! The Boston Globe said "it takes $50 to more than $100 to complete that kind of game", which translated as "it takes $50 to $100mmore...". The old word-of-mouth exercice strikes back. Massively didn"t even check the tweet vs the original.

The point was, Tolkien hated the industrial revolution. The scourging of the Shire was probably his most pointed allegory in that direction.

Why develop cannons when your mage team can drop the equivalent of a mini-nuke on an opposing fortress? Who needs poison gas when your mages start doing vador chokeholds on the soldiers?

The game that had potential - real, shattering potential - was Stargate. Except it was ran to the ground due to... what? We"ll know probably someday. But when the producer of the show tells you "if there was a game, it would already be out", you know it"s joined the Duke in the valhalla of...

That"s one of the most endearing things with Martin. He will kill anyone if it advances a good story. No one is safe. Most people know Martin from his recent series, but I followed him since the days of the Wild Card series (which is what Heroes should have been, instead of the slowly...

Dofus is Europe"s take on the myriad of asian browser-based games. It"s all written in flash (yep, the same flash you use), is completely multi-platform, lightweight, works on even computers that wouldn"t run vanilla WoW, and targets the teens/young adult. It"s not a MMORPG, it"s more of a...

That"s why I said it was a problem. A different from the "how much does 68 crit rating adds to my chances of critting", but a problem still. There"s a reason I wrote my example using stats named "crit" and "resilience". WoW is already following that road. When you PvP, how much will you crit...

As you note: it works... if you do it in a context where there"s very little item progression. The intent of the game is not that you replace items from one content to the next content (be it "next level", "next expansion", whatever). But even then, when they started to introduce Tech 3, they...

Then what? +Gooderer stat and that"s all? There are tons of gameplay elements, and being able to boost specific elements, or categories, is good. The division between base stats (+hp, +mana, +hit) and main stats (+agi, which adds +dmg, +crit, +dodge) is also good. What WoW failed is their...

An interesting evolution in WoW is that they have added significant raid-level gear that is BOE. If you take a look at BOE epics, you will notice that every boss in nax 25 (save KT), every boss in Ulduar 10 (save Freya and Yogg... and presumably Algalon), every boss in Ulduar 25 (save Yogg and...

Actually, those are two distinct segments of the population. There"s a lot of people who take crafting to wear their own goods, and couldn"t care about selling stuff (with WoW profession perks, it"s taken to the extremes, when people take a profession only because it makes themselvesONEsingle...

Why randomness? You can have a CCG mechanism without the randomness. The following is a design I had for a kind of on-line MMOish version of NetRunner (which is/was a real CCG). You, the runner, have a cyber-deck, and a set of software. Your cyberdeck has a memory size, which opens N slots...

The usual. Anyone who expects "many" people to be productive and creative working 80 hours a week is someone with lots of delusions in human nature. While there are people who can work obscene amounts of time and be significantly productive, those people are exceptions. In 99% of the case...

Ahem, no. Adding players means you kill the ennemy before he kills the "tank". On your own, you die before the boss is halfway down? With 3 people, you succeed instead.

Why do I suddendly have a flashback of Item magic with Mattekar Robes (if you don"t know what I"m talking about... that"s only for Asheron"s Call old timers)

"Hey guys, we did Onyxia, isn"t she doing more deep breaths than she used to?"

No, it"s just that he"s Alliance.

It"s the pendant of the militaring saying: "Amateurs talk of tactics. Professionals talk of logistics" Until I got into a studio in 2000, tools were... well, tools. I mean, the stuff no one cares about. The lead 3D guy introduced me to the philosophy of tools, and why they made everything...

It"s not that I"m anti-multibox. Far from it; how people play... I couldn"t care less about it. It"s just that you need to realize that multiboxing is NOT a significant amount of the playerbase. At all. The only games where it is prevalent are those where you need multiple players to do...

(splutter). Sorry. You ruined my mug of coffee. I would be surprised if the multiboxer customer base was expressed in any double digit %. 40%? In what kind of twisted perverted parallel universe do you live in? Don"t tell me: Sam Da Man is a world celebrity there and goes on to explain his...

DAoC had normal zoning. Just like EQ (and yes, they usually disguised their zone-in with a twisting tunnel or passage, so you"d vanish into the dungeon as soon as you turned the corner). And, since they didn"t had instancing, you found yourself with everybody else inside anyway.

Does work. You do have to resurrect the old "twisty passage" of EQ lore to make those look realistic. If people start to vanish mid-tunnel, you do get a reality dissonance that"s about as annoying as a loading screen. But, if you can have people still appear on your view for a couple yards...

And then, the next expansion raises you to 90, so you"re a bigger god. And the 4th expansion to 100, so you"re an ?ber god. The problem here is AD&D thinking. Levels as an absolute scale. Whereas WoW has repeatedly said that levels were an indication of "when" your character is, and mobs...

Guildwars did it. It was (is?) a neat subgame of getting the right missions, and collecting the various skills from bosses so you could have a large variety. You had access to 2 elite slots and 6 base slots. For those who haven"t played Guildwars, you run with the above skills. A number of...

And you"d be surprised how few people think like this. I work in computer security these days (ok, apart from my stint in the game industry, like these last 14 years), and that always strikes people how I approach things. When I"m presented with some new things, my first impulse isn"t "how...

Exactly. The point is not to listen to your playerbaseas a whole. Well, a bit. The trick is to figure out who is competent, and listen to them. Just because you"re not shown the nitty gritty internal meetings doesn"t mean you"re walking blindfolded. Do not underestimate the players - a few...

Given millions of people playing, youwillfind all the gamut of opinions on it. Including the fact that it"s "meh". Or worse. Of course, I find defaults in the game. It"s not perfect. Nothing is. There"s rough pieces (the various factions who are completely undevelopped - so undevelopped they...

What "won" WoW is the yellow "!". The plugging-in of an essentially single player RPG mechanic (the quest line) in the MMO. All MMOs prior to WoW essentially relied on player being fully autonomous. You had no (or very little) pointers, you had to decide what to do. EQ2 (which launched at the...

I could live with lag. At least some, not too much. What kills me is two months of "Additional instances cannot be launched. Please try later"

It"s called Badges of Valor, and it works. Most of the time, it"s because these tools did not exist when the game launched. To be honest, we"re using the WoW chat system, because simply with enough mac users (guilty), most of the Window-centric systems don"t work well. The Ventrilo server...

I suspect those quest are already cut down to less than that. Most of the 136 quests can"t be taken out of the bat. They are the "multiple steps" you want to add to the overall quest line. Most of these larger quest arcs are quite short, but you do have some that go for dozens of steps, even in...

True, but to achieve that, you break down the "good ole rpg" model. Doing so requires people to know, in advance, what quest steps they need to do. It enshrines spoiler sites as "good gameplay", which is a detriment to a mass-market game (most people do not read spoiler sites). If someone...

The problem of fewer/longer quests is that, quite simply, you play even less in groups. Having lots of quests in progress allows you to team with other players, to advance them. If you have 20 quests in progress, your same-level friend may have 6 or 7 in common with you. If you have 3 quests in...