moakh

@aurickle The division of the world into chunks isn't actually related to the client side, but to the server side. A MMO game server is usually a cluster made of several server machines. What's happening when your character crosses a chunk border, is that the server machine running the process for chunk A is handing your character over to the server running the target chunk.
This takes a little time and that is why the game freezes for a short amount of time. Sometimes, chunking goes wrong and the Server drops your session entirely. Then you get disconnected.

Every game has more than enough solo content in my opinion. The trick is not to force people into group content, but make it a viable and worthwile alternative.
I like to think back to Anarchy Online, where you could level faster in a group. With a good group composition you had tons of buffs availlable to increase the strength of your characters. And the group leveld up when it stayed together long enough. You got more XP from kills and better loot, the longer you played together as a group. That was a lot of fun.
What I like to see is more progression for group players, to encourage group play, like mentoring or any type of currency in game that can be acquired by group play.
A lot of developers tackle aging group content in games by trivializing it and making it solo-able. Why not introduce incentives like mentoring and additional character progression for veteran players to revisit this content and help newer players so that anybody can experience it at is was intended? I think I might be sketching my personal MMO utopia here and it does contradict the modern way of cash shop driven MMO design, but hell, this should be what a _multiplayer_ game is about, shouldn't it?

I play it from time to time, although I never really got sucked into it. I was an avid WoW player back when GW was fresh and even though I had the box sitting on my shelf for a long time, it took until last year to finally get myself to play it.
I played the Prophecies campaign and quite enjoyed it. So, I login from time to time in anticipation of GW2.

I tried to get back into this game several times, but every time the dated visuals are killing it for me. So please please funcom, get the shiny new graphics engine going :)

@TortoiseCan: I'm sorry if my comment has caused such a stir of emotions for you.

Well, LOTRO is doubtfully the largest MMO availlable on the market, nor does it have *years* of content. It sure is a pretty and big world and there sure is a lot to do, as you would expect from a game at that age. I certainly do not want to make this game look bad, as I have played and enjoyed it quite some time.

But even you can impossibly say that Turbine's announcement policy is flawless. In fact, after years of MMO development they should have some awareness on what workload their project teams can handle and what is just too much to announce.
As somebody that works in software development myself (unfortunately nothing that has anything to do with the heads of cats or dogs) I know that sometimes things need to get rescheduled, maybe even shelved. But constantly and continuously dodging your own announcements and coming short on own promises just makes you look bad.

And that is why you should take everything with a grain of salt. In the case of Turbine a grain might just not be enough.

@Mister Eee: Turbine has always been very good at planning and announcing big things to come. However, sticking to their plans has not so much been a virtue of them.

Do you remember the initial plan to release a major content patch every 3 months, with new land zones added every 2nd update?
Or their announcement of a second PvMP zone with the Moria expansion?
Or their plans to improve housing beyond what it still is today?
Or their plans to add more hobbies besides fishing into the game?
Or the initial announcement of the ingame shop to be an alternative way to pay for game content and that the sale of items wouldn't be on the radar ever?

I wouldn't believe too much in Turbine before they really deliver something they promise.

I'd imagine they would run out of playable characters pretty quickly if it ever came to a Lotr-MOBA.

Game of Drones.

Very elaborate, I like this one very much. :)

Thanks for the roundup. As a European Massively reader, I'm usually occupied during the live streams and tend to forget about them once I get to the computer. So this column is pretty awesome. Keep it going!

I experienced a lot of lag and a lot of added currencies (like Lucky Charms) you have to grind (or buy) to unlock certain stuff. Also, the chat is flooded by Palladium sellers spamming all the time.
Not the greatest experience.