Opinion

A curious thing happened as I was strolling through EverQuest II this past week. It seems there was a bit of commotion in the Norrathian community, with races good and evil cheering and dancing in the streets. Personally, I didn't even know Sarnak could move like that! What was the catalyst of this celebration? Why, didn't you hear -- there was news about EverQuest Next! And with the scarcity of that kind of treasure, it's understandable that folks went a'frolicking. But this wasn't just any old news, either. This week, fans learned that Emily "Domino" Taylor, also known as Pentapod, was returning to the EverQuest franchise as the producer for EQ Next.

Can the presence of just one person really send prospective players into a tizzy of anticipation? Yes, it can. I watched as a number of EQII players, once ambivalent or on the fence about EQN, not only look twice at the upcoming sandbox but hop right on over into the newest Norrath's camp. More eyes than ever are watching the development of this game (even though there is scant little to watch at the moment). And this is why.

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The thing about Final Fantasy XIV's crafting is that it's always been an odd mixture of wonderful and terrible, much like the game as a whole. You had crazily interconnected crafts that could be frustrating to level, the simple difficulty of trying to find the items you need, and a minigame that made mass production maddeningly slow. But you also had a real sense of personal craftsmanship, and the complex interplay between quality, durability, and progress meant that your successes or failures were truly your own.

None of these elements has been removed from the beta phases, but each has been streamlined and largely improved. The test phases allowed us to explore the two crafting classes based in Gridania, Carpenter and Leatherworker, and so I got to really dive into the heart of working with wood and dead animal hides. It was a lot more fun than that summary might imply.

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No matter how hard you try, you cannot defeat large-group endgame bosses with an awesome guitar solo. Big guilds offer you the people needed to tackle this sort of content. In some games, though, big guilds get even more. World of Warcraft guilds level faster with more people, and Star Wars: The Old Republic will be adding a bonus to guilds based on their overall sizes (although you'll easily get the bonus so long as no original members of the guild have left). In some places, size matters.

Should it matter? Organizing and maintaining a guild with 50 members is a lot more work than one with 15 members, so mechanical bonuses certainly give some incentive. Those bonuses also lead to guilds wanting to be bigger without necessarily getting any better; more live bodies, no matter the quality. And bigger guilds can already have advantages over smaller guilds. So should big guilds have a mechanical advantage over smaller ones? Or should the size be its own reward?

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 don't know if you noticed this, but in the fully rendered trailer for The Elder Scrolls Online, the Aldmeri Dominion elves looked nice. In traditional fantasy lore like Lord of the Rings, elves are some of the most beautiful creatures in the universe. However, I've always seen the Elder Scrolls elves as somewhat alien -- like the grey-men kind of aliens. In fact, the dark elves with their ashy skin really looked like grey men, especially if they were bald. Yet that particular MMO trailer presented a different kind of elf.

Of course, that's just a CGI trailer, and CGI trailers rarely represent what we will see in the game. I can accept that. But more and more screenshots have popped up and more in-game videos have appeared on different websites, and in each of them, it appears to me that the elves -- the "mer" -- have received a makeover. And it's not just the elves; even the Argonians and Khajiit look different. I suspect there's a reason for this.

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Playing a stupid character is oddly frustrating because it's incredibly difficult to do.

This should not be the case. This should, in fact, be the opposite of the case. Playing someone with the mental alacrity of a ball of twine should be much easier than your brilliant wizard. But when you try to play a dumb character, it's easy for that character to wind up slipping into periods of pointless stupidity without acting like any of the nitwits you've actually dealt with over the course of your life.

Intelligence is a hard thing to quantify at the best of times, but some of our characters are meant to be just plain slow. I've played a few, and it's always a challenge to make the character feel like a person instead of a caricature. So here are some tips for making your big dummy feel appropriately oafish and endearing instead of just being a strawman.

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So Final Fantasy XIV has announced its relaunch date, along with another collector's edition for people to buy. I'd like to point out here that I still have the original collector's edition sitting on a shelf in my office, and it has been stated clearly that all of the digital gewgaws for the collector's edition will be awarded to people with the old version. Yet I still have to fight the urge to buy another CE anyway, because there's an art book and other physical trinkets.

MMOs especially are games that you should never need to re-purchase. But sometimes you can find a game packaging something nice in with another purchase, and it almost becomes worth it to have another copy despite not needing a second account. So would you re-buy a game for new bonuses, either in-game or just bonus trinkets? Or does the very idea seem ridiculous to 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!

Once upon a time (OK, a few weeks ago), I was playing an ARAM as Diana. I had a fairly bad score (I'm passive and don't chase kills), and we lost. One of my teammates blamed me, claiming my item build was awful. It was largely because I didn't build Rabadon's Deathcap.

Deathcap is one of the perennial caster items in League of Legends. Not only does it give an enormous amount of ability power, but it also increases all of your ability power (including what it grants) by a whopping 30%. This seems so ridiculously powerful! Even though it's expensive, 30% increase in AP is such a huge boost to damage that it can't be beaten.

Is this really the case, though? In Summoner's Rift, I completely agree that Deathcap is a great item. In Twisted Treeline, Wooglet's Witchcap (the replacement item for Deathcap) is also incredible. However, in Dominion and ARAM, the fast-paced action and frequent conflicts change the nature of the wizard hats considerably.

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I'm a Red Sox fan, and if there's ever a team that can exemplify the ups and downs of running a guild, it's the Red Sox. This was supposed to be a rebuilding year for the team, and yet they're near the top of the standings, only a game and a half behind the Team that Shall Not be Named. Managing a guild is also very often about handling the peaks and valleys of day to day life. It's as if the whole guild were manic depressive: You need to downplay the peaks and minimize the valleys.

We've looked at the valleys quite a bit in this column because valleys represent a more urgent problem, but in this week's Guild Counsel, let's look at how to handle the peaks.

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It's a running joke on Massively that some readers believe our lives are glamorous and that we sleep in beds made out of free video game swag. The truth is that video game bloggers are working in this field because they love the job. At least that's how it is around here. Or maybe writing in our pajamas is too posh to pass up. But people still believe we are loaded with perks just because we get to wear fancy hats that say "PRESS." Just kidding. There are no hats.

Here's a recent example from a reader named Will6:

Lucky you, getting to test drive the game. Everyone knows the press get instant invites because they are a free way [for studios] to advertise their game and get the word out.

It's time for "everyone" to be disabused of that notion.

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So funny story: In planning out in advance what I wanted to talk about in this biweekly Neverwinter column, I had selected something that recently caught my eye about the game and made me happy. That something was the Neverwinter Gateway, a web portal that allows out-of-game players the ability to fiddle with their character sheets, auctions, professions, guilds, and mail. I thought -- and I still do -- that this was a nifty service that deserved a day in the sun.

As I was getting set to write that column, Neverwinter's economy exploded and then imploded over the course of a weekend, thanks to a nasty exploit that involved, yup, the Gateway. Suddenly my topic had to shift from "isn't this a neat tool?" to "check out what the tools are doing with this tool." Seeing the economy effectively destroyed in a matter of hours and how Cryptic Studios dealt with this PR nightmare might be old news at this point, but it's definitely worthy of reflection, analysis, and speculation as to how trust can be rebuilt in this fledgling title.

Let's get cracking -- we have a lot of ground to cover!

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Is it me, or has ArcheAge been a long time coming? I don't think it's me because it was three years and thousands of posts ago that Massively introduced ArcheAge to western gamers. Heck, it was six years ago that Jake Song and company started building XLGAMES' upcoming sandpark.

And it's been two years -- two years! -- since I first got my hands on the game's seemingly endless closed beta. Now, though, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Trion recently and famously signed on to publish ArcheAge in the West, and despite the silence following the announcement, I'm still optimistic about a beta before the end of the year.

Even if it that doesn't happen, we've still got plenty to talk about, which is why I'm taking the wraps off Massively's newest game-specific column. Join me after the cut for the traditional first-issue community roundup.

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You love movies? Sure, who doesn't? I certainly do; I've been reviewing them with friends since 1997. I'm always fascinated by how many out-of-the-way gems there are that go overlooked by the mainstream audience, and I love how films tie into our daily experiences in unexpected ways.

MMOs haven't quite gotten popular enough to spawn their own sub-genre of films, apart from the odd fan project or the long-rumored World of Warcraft flick. That doesn't mean that we're lacking good movie role models for our hobby, however. I think that there are plenty of films that are perfectly suited for the MMO fan, even if they've never been thought of as such.

So here are 10 films that speak to us as gamers. To make things interesting, I excluded any movie that shares the same IP as an MMO. Read this list and let me know what you would pick!

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I don't know if SOE has any plans to capitalize on the wave of Superman hype sweeping the nerdosphere on account of Zack Snyder's upcoming Man of Steel film. The firm's DC Universe Online title features the big blue boy scout rather prominently, of course, and the timing seems right if there aren't a bunch of legal stumbling blocks.

SOE has done movie tie-ins with an MMO before, way back in 2005 when its Rage of the Wookiees expansion added a bunch of Episode III-themed content to Star Wars Galaxies. Last summer, though, the firm didn't really acknowledge Christopher Nolan's final Batman film in DCUO, so it may not be in the cards for Supes either.

Regardless of what actually happens, would you like to see appropriate movie tie-in content in certain MMOs? Or do you prefer to keep the properties separate?

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!

A few days ago we reported on RIFT's impending free-to-play conversion, followed by the news that Trion was undergoing a second set of apparently unrelated layoffs. Former Trion studio GM and CCO Scott Hartsman responded to the layoffs on Twitter, intimating that aspects of the gaming industry are "fundamentally broken."

After we invited your thoughts on that same subject in a Daily Grind earlier this week, we contacted Hartsman in the hopes of getting him to elaborate. Join us after the cut for the resulting interview.

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After months of waiting, we can finally say that Star Trek Online's Legacy of Romulus expansion is upon us! After yesterday's launch, it's now possible to play as a member of the new Romulan Republic faction. It's now possible to begin a Klingon faction character from level 1! There's a new adventure zone and a completely overhauled user interface.

We recently had the opportunity to ask Star Trek Online's Executive Producer, Daniel Stahl, some questions regarding the update. We were also given a lot of screenshots of the new material, and all are included in the new gallery below. There was a lot to cover, so let's get to it!

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