Vanilla – it’s a flavour of Warcraft that veterans remember fondly. Class raids to Stratholme, 40-player raids through Molten Core, and camping general chat to find dungeon groups. It was a time before transmogs, flying mounts, or pet battles. And now, in the form of Warcraft Classic, it’s making a return. The WoW community was…
Tag: theorycraft
The Changing Face of MMOs
Sometimes, MMO commentary feels cyclical. Back in 2014, we were musing how Blizzard’s cancellation of Titan signalled an end to the grand MMO genre. Now that Daybreak Games has shoved EverQuest Next out of a similar airlock, the same opinion is doing the rounds (although with a little less doom-mongering this time around). Some existing MMOs…
How SWTOR Will Make A Profit
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how Star Wars: The Old Republic was going to be BioWare’s most expensive mistake, ending up consigned in the footnotes of history as a video gaming failure. It’s easy to see where this comes from – at a $200 million price tag this is one of the…
Pure DPS: The One True Class
Every so often I hear this argument crop up: character classes that can only deal damage shouldn’t exist in modern MMOs. Every class should instead be able to switch to tanking or healing, or possibly even both. The idea is that a shortage of any one of the three roles should be resolved by players…
The Unknown Warcraft Subscriber
There’s been a flurry of commentary recently on the recent earnings call by Activision Blizzard, where they provide some highlights on their third quarter performance. If you’re interested in reading through the entire transcript of the call you can find it at Seeking Alpha. There are a couple of quick facts to pull out: Warcraft…
The Gates of Compelling Rewards
Do you ever get the feeling that you’re somehow missing something when you read a particular piece of news? That’s how I felt when I was reading over Ghostcrawler’s latest blogppost where he talks about item stat inflation and the problem it presents. While it’s a great article that hints at some difficult choices ahead,…
Getting the Most out of Game Time
I find being a gamer these days is pretty tough. There are a ton of good quality titles out there that I’m desperate to try out. I want to get my teeth into every single one of them and wring them dry of every single droplet of Fun Essence. I want to be able to…
Tired of MMOs?
There’s been a discussion kicking around Twitter for the past week or so, which seemed to end up with a single question. I think it was probably best said by Wolfshead: “is there anything left to say about today’s MMOs that hasn’t already been said?” If we’re talking about the current crop of MMORPG games…
Mages & PvP – Fun, Lethal, or Both?
This guest post is from Bordy, a veteran player of games and dealer in lethal puns. You can find his unique brand of humour on Twitter @snuffleorc I have played WoW since the retail release. Gazimoff is the one to blame for getting me into it. It was by no means though my first MMO….
Reader Q: From Arcane to Fire
I recently got a reader email asking for some advice with improving their fire spec. I love getting messages like this as it gives me a chance to help someone out and get geeky about my favourite spec at the same time. This particular email was eerily familiar… We started raiding last evening and had…