Humor

Whenever I wander into a new town in Die2Nite, I try to be as quiet about it as I can. I walk in, nod my head at a few people, and settle down. I also try to figure out the pecking order of the town as quickly as I can. There is almost always a pecking order. If not, it's a town of chaos and likely won't last longer than a few days of zombie invasions. I've played long enough to recognize players who are trying to lead, those who are willing to follow any instruction (even if wrong), and the fact that most players are content with popping in, making a few moves, and logging out.

The town I am in at the time of this writing is called Plagued Sanitorium. The names seem randomly generated for each town, but they always fit. I am a paid member, so I can choose the town I want to start in. Once a town has 40 members, the invasions begin. At 5:00 p.m. EST every day, the site literally goes down while the zombies come. After 10 minutes of attack, players log in to see what happened and who survived. check out any one of my livestreams on the game to see it all in action.

Sanitorium is a pretty unique experience so far, but in most ways it's as common as basic human psychology.

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One of the unusual perks of being a game journalist is that you acquire a set of branded and unique USB flash drives. Aside from the pictured Final Fantasy XIV drive (which is far and away the strangest flash drive I've ever seen), I also have a World of Tanks die-cast USB drive that I'm quite fond of. Of course, it no longer contains any data even remotely related to World of Tanks, which makes all of that branding on the outside a lie.

For this reason I'm always a bit iffy on using peripherals that have prominent branding for specific games. I'd feel pretty ridiculous if I were using a World of Warcraft-branded mouse at the moment when I'm not playing the game, for instance. But what about you? Do you like game-branded peripherals, or do you prefer that your computer accessories are neutral and perhaps even austere?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

I assure you, it's a complete coincidence that I'm writing a column on romance the week of Valentine's Day. Seriously: I have a 10-gallon cowboy hat filled to the brim with ideas for Perfect Ten and draw one every two weeks. It just so happened that -- again, in a complete coincidence -- the topic of romance and a romance-centric holiday occurred on the same day.

You're not buying it, are you. I've always said that you're too wily for me.

Whether or not Valentine's Day is something you do, gaming couples do turn to their favorite hobby for a virtual dating hotspot from time to time. It only makes sense. These aren't just worlds where we are celebrated serial killers and butchers of entire races but places in which we live out pretend lives while taking it very, very seriously. So if you're ever in the position where you want to go on a date in-game, here are 10 romantic activities that this Casanova suggests.

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There was a great quote from the second season of the short-lived sitcom Sports Night when one of the characters chastises a friend who's overreacting by saying, "You've got to be able to separate the stuff from the stuff." Translated from Sorkinese, it means you need to stop lumping everything into one generic category to be upset about and instead sift through what's important and what is not.

I think this is quite applicable to the MMO community, as I see countless examples of people who just can't separate the stuff from the stuff. Everything, for some people, is a matter of utmost importance and worthy of a spontaneous riot on the same level as everything else. There are no degrees of importance; a mild nerf to a player's class is equally demanding of a 10-paragraph rant as a studio going back on its word just to screw players.

Not everything is life or death. A sign of maturity is learning to pick your battles and to mellow out the rest of the time. Let's see if we can take some steps together toward that goal.

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There is something about the cold of space and the hum of my faithful ship that makes Star Wars: The Old Republic feel like home. Or wait, it might actually be the hum of my lightsaber and the cold attitude of my companion.

Oh, forget it: Star Wars is awesome, and I'm going to tell you why. I'm a member of Massively's Stream Team, which produces live coverage of MMO titles every week with commentary and special features. So you won't be surprised to find out that this is an unconventional edition of Why I Play in that it's actually a livestream-style video rather than an article. Have a look and listen after the cut!

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Valentine's Day is nearly here, and the best way to celebrate it is to have your pixelated avatar pretend to marry someone else's pixelated avatar. MapleStory allows you to do just that, and the game has thus far had around 28,000 couples tie the knot in-game. It's also seen 15,000 of those couples subsequently divorce, which seems like a staggering number when you realize that the game does not offer any systems to model the crumbling of your emotional bonds and the slow desertion of your childhood dreams.

As it turns out, the staff at Nexon keeps track of a lot of interesting little tidbits about the marriage system. The longest marriage in the game is at 1,100 days; the shortest one clocks in at just three seconds. The average isn't too bad at 518 days, but couples that both married and divorced in 2012 wound up with an average run of 107 days. And some poor soul is already on marriage number 13, which implies Larry King-like devotions to remarriage. If you're looking at all of those stats and thinking that you can't say no, check out the wedding trailer past the break.

[Source: Nexon press release]

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There appears to be no shortage of interesting sights and sounds to experience in City of Steam, although one particular landmark looms above the rest. It's the Colossus, a slumbering defensive... thing that rests in the city proper, and Mechanist Games has an amusing post giving a bit of backstory to the machine.

Apparently the Colossus was created a long time ago as a giant mobile fortress tasked with protecting the city in times of dire peril. As the city is more or less at peace, the Colossus is in stand-by mode -- although it could be woken at any moment.

This mega-sized robot features cannons and an arm that's good for punchin' and aught else. The devs revealed that originally it had several more limbs, but revisions turned it into a walking fort instead.

If a game's gotta have classes, I say they need to sound awesome. I'm bored of Paladins and Assassins and Clerics and Warriors; I want to see Troubadors and Deadeyes and Tempests and Saboteurs and Disco Bandits. Some games, like Wakfu, have made class names into an artform: Foggernaut. Xelor's Sandglass. Sram's Shadow.

What I don't get is why a Western game company would go to the trouble of implementing class names that sound like weird translations or just generic words mashed together. I'll forgive Korean devs for the Sheath Knight. I'll forgive sandboxes for mundane Bureaucrats and Beggars. But Neverwinter's Great Weapon Fighter is just screaming for a rewrite. Or at least a hyphen.

What about you guys -- what class name would you like to see stricken from the roster of your favorite MMO? And what names stand out as the most badass?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

There's something distinctly unfair about being an American fantasy fan. If you enjoy all of the movies or run around in all of the wonderful fantasy landscapes you'll quickly notice how un-American the inhabitants are. Sure, monsters or knights in a fantasy MMO don't really belong to any one nationality or time, but they are more likely to sound like they're from England rather than Long Island. It's not fair. What do Americans have in their past that is anything as cool as knights and swords?

Actually, we've had some pretty cool stuff over here as well. And, if you think about it, a lot of it is pretty much like a more recent middle ages... sort of. The thought sunk in as I was looking at Salem, a hardcore free-for-all PvP MMO by Paradox Interactive. Then the thought really sunk in when I recently fell in love with The West by Innogames, a German publisher.

America has a very primitive, and recent, past that had to feel a lot like a time of magic and wonder to those who were in it. Why aren't we seeing more Western MMOs or games set in the time of the founding of our country?

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I first intended to use this article as a list of things to avoid if you are an indie dev, and I was going to use Star Sonata, an indie, twitch-based space MMO, as the prime example on that list. The game works, sure, and it obviously has a playerbase that seems to enjoy itself, but I am not sure how long it might take a normal, new player to achieve the same level of happiness. I literally had to re-do this visit to the game because the first attempt was hijacked by a glitchy livestream and other issues. Luckily, the first attempt had primed this second one a bit more, but I have still spent most of the week confused.

The worst part about being so lost in a game like Star Sonata is that it's very easy to see just how much potential the game has. Hopefully, this article -- combined with input from the players -- might just help the developers fix some of the very basic issues that are hurting this game.

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The other night, a friend of mine took to Twitter to express her displeasure over an EverQuest II mission. "I have to do something called Jenni's Stained Pants," she said, nonplussed. "This may be the most insulting quest I've ever done."

While the actual mission turned out to be more benign than she'd anticipated from the title, I could relate. There have been so many quests in MMOs that aren't just beneath my stature but outright mocking my status as a hero. How many times have we had to pick up poo on the whims of a developer? Or pluck flowers for Elves? Or run extremely pointless errands because an NPC has a deadly case of fat butt and doesn't want to stop watching Honey Boo Boo?

So let it out today: What's the most insulting quest you've ever done? Vent! Lance that wound! Rebuff those devs who think it's OK to make a monkey out of you!

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

So The Secret World was on sale on Origin this week for $10. Since it's buy-to-play at this point, that's well within the realm of prices where I start nodding and saying that it's a good deal, and the next thing I knew, I had bought the game. And I installed it. And now I've... well... I don't know exactly. I'm not playing it yet, but there's no real reason not to. It's not as if I'm worried about wasting my free month or something.

But I bought it, and I own it, and now I'm just sitting on it.

Sometimes we buy MMOs knowing that we'll start playing them soon but not right now. I let Guild Wars 2 sit for a long while before I got in and started playing. So today the question is whether or not you've ever bought a game and then sat on it for a while before playing it? Including if you literally put the game box on a chair and parked there for a couple of hours, I suppose. Everyone has rituals.

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

I took only a single marketing class in college, so by no means am I an instant expert in anything but being on the receiving end of marketers' nefarious experiments to manipulate me so that I buy their stuff. I did take away the lesson that all marketers are professional liars who have no shame or dignity. Pretty much the same as a blogger, so I guess I have a backup career.

Believe it or not, MMOs get off easy when it comes to notorious marketing campaigns. Anything on the following list, good or bad, is a pale shadow of what we've seen in the larger video game industry. Still, there have been plenty of attempts to promote MMOs in ways that make us either applaud or laugh at the studio (and sometimes both at once, which takes coordination).

After doing some staff polling and internal polling, here are 10 memorable marketing campaigns from the era of MMORPGs. Maybe they're all winners in that they got noticed by at least one person, even if they're the most foolish notions in history. Here we go!

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This is probably a rant best saved for another day, but I want to know when it became completely acceptable not to demand that MMO studios explain the building blocks of their game universes. The devs know that we'll just draw on tropes (usually fantasy) to fill in the gap, so most of the explanations they give for in-game reasoning have to do with a weak backstory of a class instead of why, say, a liquid potion binds together bones and allows you resurrect completely after being chopped into 60 pieces.

I get why tropes are depended on so much, but in my opinion, they rob these games of the potential to be more immersive and lifelike. Pretty much most elements of MMO games break down even when you apply the game's own internal logic (what little has been revealed) to it. Chief among these borked elements? Armor.

MMO armor just doesn't make sense, nor does it hold up to even a light level of scrutiny. Today we're going to cast aside the "it's just fantasy, go with it" excuses to investigate why your gear is completely ridiculous from a common sense standpoint. Heck, I wasn't even breathing hard by the time I counted to 10 on this one.

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At the end of December, the Massively staff laid out its predictions for 2013 in a tidy post, after which a reader named flatline4400 graciously complimented our wild conjecture:

I think Bree and Patrick are right on in a number of points. (Bree also did very well in last year's predictions too!)

We are pretty awesome, aren't we? Well, except for the part where I also predicted City of Heroes 2. Soooooo maybe not so awesome after all.

In today's Ask Massively, let's take a peek back at our staff predictions from last year, the ones we made in 2011 for 2012. And let's count the hits and the misses. Did we get as much right as we got wrong? Come on -- it'll be fun(ny).

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