Posts tagged karen-bryan 
The Daily Grind: Are you sick of gear resets?
Earlier this week, Massively RIFT columnist Karen Bryan expressed frustration over the seemingly inevitable MMO expansion problem: gear resets. We expect new gear along with our new content, but a complete gear reset, she argued, "renders all previous raid content irrelevant." Everything you ...
The Guild Counsel: Help, other games are stealing my members!
I have to start off this week's column with a hearty show of sympathy for current guild leaders because in some ways, it's much harder to manage a guild now than it was a decade ago when MMOs were just in their infancy. When I first created a guild in EverQuest with a friend, we had the luxury of ...
The Tattered Notebook: Celebrating the search for the perfect UI
EQInterface and EQ2Interface have been stalwart sidekicks for me through the years, and it's great to see them expand into other games. They now have a library of UIs for several MMOs and have really helped put player-made UIs on the map. EverQuest II's site had a news article announcing that the ...
Enter at Your Own Rift: First impressions from returning players
What do a statistician, a tinkerer, a party guy, a time-challenged player, and my better half all have in common? They're a handful of gamers who have recently been playing RIFT with me, and many of them have come back after a break from the game. It's pretty much been one coincidence after ...
The Guild Counsel: Gender choice and guild drama
There are many reasons for guild drama, but one of the most challenging comes from a single choice that we make before our characters even see the light of day. In MMOs, character creation can consist of full customization, or it can simply be a choice among some pre-sets, but the majority of ...
The Tattered Notebook: The EQII face that launched a thousand ships
The tale of Helen and Paris is a classic one. Paris of Troy, blinded by Helen's beauty, was willing to risk full-scale naval invasion and the destruction of his home city in order to be with her. But what if the Paris and Helen love story had been more like the movie Shallow Hal, in which the ...
The Tattered Notebook: EverQuest II's Antonica public quest
EverQuest II's upcoming Qeynos revamp brings many new changes, but one that runs the risk of getting overlooked is a new public quest in Antonica. It's not necessarily a surprise that a low-level PQ would be added, since there was one in the Commonlands after the Freeport revamp. But I actually ...
The Guild Counsel: Bad gamers
You'll have to forgive me this week for channeling the spirit of Andy Rooney and getting my grump on, but I need to get something off my chest. When it comes to MMOs, I tend to have an optimistic view of things. I think MMOs offer a lot when it comes to learning about ourselves, making ...
Enter at Your Own Rift: The joy of mentoring
One of the reasons I like RIFT so much is that it has similar features to my other favorite MMO, EverQuest II. That's not really surprising, since RIFT's Executive Producer is Scott Hartsman, who was formerly EQII's Senior Producer and Creative Director. Since mentoring is one of the cornerstones ...
The Tattered Notebook: Changes in EverQuest II's Dark(light)
EverQuest II's Qeynos update is due in just a few weeks. In recent editions of The Tattered Notebook, we've looked at some of the bigger changes, like "play as your avatar" and "level agnosticism" in the dungeon maker as well as the Qeynos city revamp. But in the build-up to the patch's due date, ...
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Hartsman: 'The traditional AAA style of development and distribution' is broken
Posted on May 22nd 2013 4:30PM