/AFK: Ganked Edition

To gank, or not to gank, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous rogues,
Or to take arms spec against a sea of Horde,
And by opposing end them? To die, to rez,
No more; and by rez to say we end
The losing streak, and the thousand natural shock blasts
That virtual flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to rez;
To rez, perchance to get revenge – ay, there’s the rub!

Welcome back to /AFK, the weekly roundup of interesting blog posts that caught my eye:

• KIASA — I perceive these lords at this encounter do so much admire that they devour their reason and scarce think
  “No XP, No Fighty-Fighty: the motto of MMO players the world over.”

• Gankalicious — EVE Online judged
  “The Eve community sucks. Many players view you as content, pure and simple.”

• Levelcapped — We are prisoners
  “They have absolutely no stake in the potential success of others, but they do have a potential victory in the failure of others.”

• Psychochild — A tale of two free to play games
  “I still think the “free to play” business model, when done properly as in the case of Puzzle Pirates, is the best for both developers and players.”

• GTFOOTF — Can’t we all get along?
  “The question is, Why? Why are they so upset when another person likes a game they don’t like?”

• Kill Ten Rats — Why we ding, part 1
  “But I do wonder if we have sped up too fast, to give too much fast or instant gratification, and removed that feeling that only a DING! can give.”

• MMO Quests — The trouble with April Fools
  “See, when a quest npc happens to be transformed into a bunny they no longer respond to player hails. This left a LOT of very angry players.”

• High Latency Life — Lifetime achievement award
  “If you don’t know any of these bloggers, please go visit them yourself, and find out why I love them so much.”

• Dragonchasers — Rift: Play games, have fun
  “We’re blessed with the chance to play these wonderful games that no other generation has experienced.”

• MMO Gamer Chick — Rift: One month of cleric-ing around
  “Dammit, I love my Cleric.”

• TOR Wars — The top 10 reasons I will be playing an Imperial Agent
  “Anyone that has seen Tom Berenger’s Oscar-worthy performance alongside Billy Zane in 1993’s pièce de résistance, Sniper, knows that sniping (and covering yourself with poop to throw dogs off your tracks) is definitely the coolest way to fight a fight.”

/AFK: Humorous Choice Edition

If you have a choice between boring A and exciting B, will you not pick B and consider yourself a rogue, even though everyone else would most likely pick B as well?

And if C decided to stop by and challenge your expectations, it might stand to reason that a switch would be in order.  But only if D didn’t pop in, announce “All of the above!” and ruin everyone’s day.  Oh, D, the only letter we hate more than you is the dreaded E — “None of the above!”

Welcome back to /AFK, a weekly roundup of interesting blog posts that caught my attention:

• The Pink Pigtail Inn — One chilly, blustery morning in March
  “This is the final post at The Pink Pigtail Inn. My days as a WoW blogger have come to an end.”

• Hardcore Casual — The real Rift review
  “If you enjoy themepark MMOs, Rift as a whole is the best one yet. Not for any one reason, but for all of them.”

• West Karana — Rift: Imagine a world without quests
  “Only a last few Defiants, by sending reincarnated heroes with borrowed souls into the past, threw the dice of the fate of the world one final time… so that I could pick mushrooms around a lake.”

• Dragonchasers — Rift: Guess I’m a public group convert
  “So I’m not really complaining so much as marveling at the fact that I missed that Public Group button, since I wasn’t really a fan of the system when it was first introduced.”

• Elder Game — Evolving quests
  “WoW changed the thinking here. For the most part, it never even occurred to us in the MMO industry that it might be possible to create so much content that players could level entirely through quests and never repeat a single one.”

• Rift Watchers — Questing in RIFT is not as bad as you’ve heard
  “It is Kill Ten Rats, Collect Ten Foozles, Zap 10 Badwots with the Magical Badwot Zapper,but you know what? It does it with style. It’s flashy. It’s fast paced. It’s dangerous. Those are three things quests should be.”

• We Fly Spitfires — I like big swords
  “When I play MMOs I immediately pick melee classes and then go out of my way to find the biggest, meanest looking sword I can possibly find in order to proceed smacking the living daylights out of everything whilst giggling with glee.”

• Consoling Gamers — Kirking your yeoman and other distractions
  “During none of these games do these signposted relationships feel like they are actually meaningful, and they’re just a numbers game of being nice to them until they decide that maybe you’re not that bad after all.”

• KIASA — I’ll cheer you up if you’re depressed, if you’re murdered I’ll avenge your death
  “Romance had never been something that had crossed my mind in RPGs.”

• Lorehound — Rift vs. WoW: Can’t we all just get along?
  “If you love a game, yes by all means defend it. But keep your arguments on-point and about the game.”

• Levelcapped — Let me tell you a story
  “The Sims: Medieval has – at this moment – become one of my Favorite Games Of All Time™.”

• Kill Ten Rats — Sari-surma: An example of reasonable puzzle bosses
  “My general guide to ‘is this a fair puzzle’ instead of trial and error gameplay is ‘could you possibly win on the first try?’”

/AFK: Pax Catchup Edition

One of the worst things about coming back from a trip is all of the catching up you have to do — especially if you happen to have hundreds of blogs in your Google Reader.  I tried my best, but after a day or so of scrolling I gave up and marked all as read.  Ergo, this week’s /AFK is incomplete in a sense, as it’s both covering two weeks’ worth of posts and missing a bunch of those posts at the same time.  Ah well!

Welcome back to /AFK, a weekly roundup of interesting posts that caught my eye:

• Untold Entertainment — How I gamed GDC’s top social game developers
  “If anything, bucking convention and winning the coin game reminded me that the greatest gains are made by subversion, disruption, and going against the grain.”

• Procrastination Amplification — Ten bad things about RIFT
  “Different soul setups really need to feel more different, not only to the player but also to other players in the group.”

• MMO Reporter — The naming of chars
  “It drives me crazy to see someone play a rogue named ‘Death-Rouge’ or a variant of this, usually with loads of accented characters. To use your class as a name is wrong of itself, but to then misspell it?”

• Elder Game — The griefer with the coin bag
  “When you have a griefer, you have to take stock of your game: is your game designed for griefers?”

• Epic Slant — PAX East 2011 in review
  “This year I attended my first PAX and I have to say that in comparison to the other conventions I regularly hit it felt far larger and friendlier!”

• MMO Gamer Chick — My SWTOR bounty hunter origins demo playthrough
  “The most impressive thing is the voiceover. They’re not kidding — the VO makes the game, I think.”

• The Ancient Gaming Noob — If you had asked me 12 years ago…
  “I ran down to Fry’s on this date 12 years back, bought my copy of EverQuest, and went home to play it that night. I still have the receipt from Fry’s showing the time and date when I bought my copy.”

• Spinksville — 5 reasons why it’s good to play multiple MMOs
  “Playing in a new game world, with different people, a different style of endgame, new character classes – it may relight the fire!”

• We Fly Spitfires — All excited for The Secret World
  “Perhaps the biggest attraction of The Secret World for me is the fact that it’s got such a unique take on the traditional MMO genre.”

• The Pink Pigtail Inn — Why it matters so much to us what other people play
  “We want our games to be crowded. And when we’re afraid that our world won’t be as crowded in the future as it used to be, we become worried and somewhat whiny.”

• Levelcapped — Don’t cry for me World of Warcraft
  “But really, WoW community. You’ve had the cat-bird’s seat for many, many years. You can’t blame people for getting excited about an alternative – we might even whisper “competitor” if we want to fan flames, although I think it’s far to early for that discussion to be had in serious circles.”

• Casual Is As Casual Does — One of us and level ennui
  “After months of gentle cajoling (which didn’t work), and more recently, letting him watch over my shoulder as I trudge through vanquishes, Zaishen bounties, and re-build my character stock in general, Mr. Randomessa has caved in and decided to give Guild wars another try.”

P.S. – Go check out Ferrel’s book on guild leadership! Way to go, man!

/AFK: Success is in the Definition Edition

What be this “success” we’ve heard so much about?  Be it fun, sales, lasting memories or the sheer fact that a game made it to launch in an industry that chokes its young to death on a regular basis?  One thing is for certain: You are successful just for reading Bio Break.  Lesser mortals have tried and fallen dead on the spot from the exposure.

Welcome back to /AFK, my weekly roundup of interesting blog posts and pertinent quotes:

• Ex Post Ninja — Metrics for success
  “We’ve seen the game launch strong, but MMOs are a marathon, not a sprint.”

• West Karana — DDO is having a birthday party and you’re invited… to spend money
  “But when they offer a special player event and then decide for no real reason to hide part of it behind a paywall, well… that’s just being mean.”

• The Common Sense Gamer — Rift: Don’t worry, gamers have short memories
  “I tell ya…it was just awesome to see the balance between MMO gamer selfishness and community goals finally reached.”

• Combat Archaeology — Captain’s log: there and back again
  “On the whole, the game has begun to feel much more like Star Trek, and that’s even before I’ve played the new missions.”

• Epic Slant — What to love about Rift
  “To me, Rift marks the death of the chore-reward-centric MMORPG. This is innovation to me.”

• Dragonchasers — Rift factions as sports franchises
  “At first I found it really silly…why should I care what someone says about a fictitious faction in a video game?”

• Multiplaying — Well given I’m 507 in the queue…
  “As for the Rift system.. what can I say? It’s damn near perfection. I’ve literally tried looking for things I didn’t like or had issues with, and I’ve thus far been unsuccessful.”

• Levelcapped — Merry Riftmas!
  “Trion has really gone above and beyond what we normally see from developers, and the game itself has some major selling points as well that allow it to stand out from the steady stream of ho-hum that we’ve had to endure in the MMO space over the past few years.”

• Overly Positive — The silly setup of failure
  “They make forum threads predicting doom and gloom, blog about how the next best thing isn’t quite as good as sliced bread, and are always quick to insert an oppositional, Eeyore-like shrug into conversations that excitedly talk about what’s coming up.”

• Hunter’s Insight — The arthritic dog
  “It really did surprise me that even though Arenanet set out to make Guild Wars 2, they left Guild Wars to rot.”

• MMOSH — Momento mori, Hawley
  “Most of all, I don’t want to kill the guild with my stupid sense of humour and inability to Just. Shut. Up.”

• Stabbed Up — Rift: Greater than the sum of its parts
  “Rift has gone viral, will go more viral still and in a genre where WoW has held 90% of market share in NA and EU for a long time there will henceforth be two major players.”

• Stylish Corpse — Sucker for a happy ending
  “What only other introverts seem to understand, however, is that this doesn’t make me unsociable or anti-social — quite the contrary. I’m extremely sociable, it’s just that my terms for it aren’t the same as those of your average extrovert.”

• Lowered Explectations — Spectator sports: The Rift dent
  “I personally feel Rift COULD be the first million subber game, if they keep their cool, work on the games strong points and hold on tight to their player base they have created.”

/AFK: Server Is Full Edition

Long lines coupled with a naturally impatient society equals tempers, raging forum posts and amusement for the rest of us.  Sure, I hate long queues too, but it’s not as if I’m lacking other things to do or play, so I keep a sense of humor about it and dutifully wait until it’s my time to shine.

Welcome back to /AFK, the weekly roundup of interesting blog posts that caught my eye:

• Ex Post Ninja — How Dragon Age 2 made me excited for the Old Republic
  “I became convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that Star Wars: The Old Republic is going to be a fascinatingly fun game to play.”

• Battle Priestess — Squeakety Squeak Squeak
  “Last night I found a consumable item that turned me into a squirrel for 30 minutes. Hijinks ensued! “

• Creep — An interesting quest
  “Here is a way saying, I may not be here but you will be, so take this and in using it, remember me.”

• We Fly Spitfires — EverQuest progression server impressions
  “Forsooth, I can roleplay again!”

• West Karana — Star Trek Online FE303: Frozen
  “That our presence had not gone unnoticed by the Remans was no surprise. That we were expected, and to some extent even welcomed, we did not understand.”

• MMO Gamer Chick — It’s the little things that thrill
  “I was more baffled and amused, not to mention shocked, by the complete randomness of finding a dead dwarf in a chest, up here in the middle of nowhere in a place one would have to tightrope to reach.”

• MMO Quests — Adventures on Fippy Darkpaw Day 3
  “The point of this whole experiment (at least for myself) is to experience the COMMUNITY for what it used to be.”

• Overly Positive — Bardic coolness
  “I’m totally convinced that the Bard-like classes in an MMO, that base attacks and magic around playing music, are the middle child of MMO class-dom.”

• Rift Watchers — It ’twas the night before launch
  “It’s the night before and here I am,up late, twiddling my thumbs, and wishing the minutes into hours so that 1 PM will get here a little bit quicker. I might seem silly. After all, it’s just a game. And one I’ve already played at that.”

• Tastes Like Battle Chicken — Like a ninja: two years of Tastes like Battle Chicken
  “Thanks for letting me make a home in my little corner of the blogosphere for the past 2 years.”

• Blacksen’s End — Where did Blizzard lose it?
  “Over the past month, something historic is occurring within the player base of World of Warcraft. For the first time, tens of thousands of players are quitting without leaving for another MMO.”

P.S. — He called it, folks!

/AFK — Fippy Darkpaw Edition

The big topic this past week was the opening of a new EverQuest time-locked progression server.  Both old and new EQ players flocked to and overloaded the servers, looking to recapture lost experiences or experience lost history.  While I personally didn’t feel compelled to give this a swing, it’s an interesting experiment that I wish more MMOs would try.

Welcome back to /AFK, a roundup of the most interesting blog posts that caught my eye last week:

• A Casual Stroll to Mordor — Symbols and tokens and marks, oh my!
  “You loot the chest expecting to find some powerful artifact, instead some weird currency drops which you take back to town and trade in for the armor they should have given you when they asked you to go fight the bad guys. It makes no sense for the story.”

• Overly Positive — De-necessitating the MMO ranking
  “It might seem like a silly notion, but when was the last time you played a game because you felt that it ranked somewhere in some agreed-upon hierarchy of MMO-dom?”

• Werit — Q&A with WAR developer Keavan Freeman
  “It has been very exciting to see how Skaven have been used in ways we never imagined.”

• Ark’s Ark — EverQuest: What we know about how Fippy Darkpaw progression will work
  “Fippy will be using the modern smooth experience curve which eradicates hell levels.”

• Rift Watchers — A dungeon finder is coming to Rift
  “What often gets ignored in these talks, however, is the sole reason why this system came about in the first place: getting into a dungeon without a dedicated guild was hard.”

• The Ancient Gaming Noob — EverQuest nostalgia tour
  “The feeling of being there on day one is something that is tough to recapture.”

• Spinksville — MMO nostalgia AKA why you couldn’t pay me to play EQ
  “Yes, you too could travel back in time and experience what it was like to play a game with crappy graphics, arsey raiders, and where it was considered normal to camp a rare spawn for 17 hours.”

• ETCmmo — You can never go back
  “Getting oh so very lost in Neriak, I wanted to cry…. It was truly terrifying and awesome at the same time. I had never played anything like it.”

• KIASA — Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I do not know which half
  “I’m slightly baffled, as I can’t think who would being buying gold in WAR.”

• Kill Ten Rats — Faction cool factor
  “It seemed that everybody was excited about the Defiant, and ‘mature’ guilds were considering rolling Guardian side just to get away from that immature crowd.”

• Bootae’s Bloody Blog — If you could make an old MMO a modern classic
  “If DAoC’s graphics were updated and, most importantly, it had a major UI overhaul (as in every department), then I think it could step up and deliver the goods.”

• Nomadic Gamer — EQ2 versus LotRO free to play
  “I am far more likely to play LotRO as a ‘free’ game then lets say, EQ2, and I’m going to explain why with a few points that really stand out to me as being winners.”

• MMO Gamer Chick — Rift: Artifact finding
  “Which is why I’m surprised after all these weeks in the Rift beta I haven’t talked about the Artifact Collections system yet. Bottom line, I want to marry it.”

• MMO Reporter — Why MMOs are missing the boat
  “Most importantly, I want my virtual trek to have consequences. It should require effort to travel. If I go to point B, I must take into account I can’t quickly jump back to A. Why else have a big virtual world?”

/AFK: Tabasco Sauce Edition

Back in college, my friends and I went through a Tabasco sauce craze.  Each of us carried around little trademark bottles of that spicy delight to all of our meals, liberally dousing the flavor right out of whatever we were eating and replacing it with hotness.  Eggs, pizza, casserole — nothing was safe from the Tabasco invasion.  Why am I sharing this?  Because my stomach is celebrating the fact I’m past this phase, even though the scars endure.

Welcome to another /AFK, my weekly roundup of interesting and well-written blog posts:

• Bootae’s Bloody Blog — RIFT beta weekend
  “This is one great looking game and my initial concerns about the art direction have been completely washed away.”

• A Casual Stroll to Mordor — Thoughts on the legendary item system
  “So I was quite let down by the actual system. But at this point they have spent too much on it, so I don’t see huge changes like that as possible. But I do hope for smaller tweaks to the system.”

• West Carana — DDO: From Tobasco to Denise and Super Mario
  “Super Mario dungeon? Yeah. That’s Team Spode’s name for a dungeon that consists mainly of jumping, swimming, puzzle solving and traps.”

• Common Sense Gamer — Is Rift hype meter too high?
  “In other words, we have a warped sense of what is real.”

• Casual is as Casual Does — And now for something completely predictable
  “No, maybe our problem is that we have to talk about everything so much and so often that we’ve already played Rift for three years in our heads.”

• Wolfshead Online — MMOs were originally designed to be social experiences
  “When players don’t need each other it breeds anti-social behavior and it results in the devaluation of other players. Players become nothing more than advanced NPCs.”

• KIASA — I’m too sexy for my shirt
  “I’m not wearing any underwear while writing this. Welcome to my fantasy, people.”

• ETCmmo.com — Valentine
  “Nothing like some exciting new content to draw me back into my favorite games.”

• Spinksville — Creating and measuring good communities in games
  “This just means that in game and cross game communities are getting more important, not less.”

• The Once and Future Geek — Titan Conjecture
  “With MMO fans frothing at the mouth for details on Blizzard’s mystery MMO –codenamed Titan- any and all official information is going to be hyper analyzed, and premature predictions will abound.”

• We Blog Spitfires — Old dog vs new pup
  “Oh the wickedness of marketing, how I deplore you.”

/AFK: The Final Countdown Edition

Two and a half weeks left, and RIFT players will finally be able to colonize Telara for good.  This isn’t a lot of time to get one’s affairs in order — families need to be abandoned, jobs quit, pets sold the circus, catheters set up, etc.  Hopefully, we’ll get it all done.

Or, y’know, we’ll just treat it like a normal game when it gets here.

Welcome back to /AFK, my weekly list of the the most interesting or well-written blog posts I’ve read:

• Kill Ten Rats — Rift beta 5: rifts ahoy
  “One mechanic I’d not seen in other games that Rift has that I loved was AE looting.”

• Gee It Laldy — Money, demographics, Sony and you
  “I fear that a good game will languish in mediocrity, and not break that illusive console MMO market due to SOE’s backwards thinking money men.”

• KIASA — A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist
  “To my mind Turbine have created an item that actively encourages the sort of selfish behaviour that a large part of the community had been resisting.”

• The Common Sense Gamer — Looking at Rift
  “The Rift System: You’ve read about this all over the place and by now, so you know generally what this is…in theory. In practice this mechanic MAKES the community work together.”

• Ardwulf’s Lair — Vanguard Abides
  “It seems to me that if the population is that small, the game’s bottom line might be improved by an order of magnitude – or more – just by making it free-to-play, and relying on a significantly higher population using the existing cash shop.”

• Battle Chicken — 5 events that moved me
  “Once I played through it and saw what happened there and really understood it, I couldn’t help but cry.”

• Tobold — The rewards of grouping
  “I believe that the strict separation of the soloing part and the grouping part of content is harmful here.”

• Rift Watchers — Does faction balance even matter?
  “Faction imbalance isn’t the end of the world. None of us want it, no underdog will enjoy it, and Trion would do well to pay attention to it.”

• Flex Your Geek — Advancements every MMO should include
  “We don’t want every game to be the same, but we do want every game to include features that aid a player in having fun.”

• Overly Positive — The not-so-odd couple of geeks and sports fans
  “The irony of this was that after ribbing me for my MMO stat-mongering, he went on to talk about his fantasy football team’s offensive and defensive numbers with rote detail.”

• Spinksville — 3 good reasons why veterans are getting bored with Cataclysm
  “So, will Cataclysm mark the beginning of the end of Blizzard’s great warhorse?”

• No Prisoners No Mercy — The Siren’s Call
  “I hate this game, but I love it, but I hate it, but I love it…”

/AFK: Classy Edition

Are you a man?  A woman?  Or are you a number?  A predefined class?  Whoooo are you, who who who who?  When people encounter you in game, do they see the person behind the avatar, or just a jarhead filling a rigid role?

Enough existential questioning for the morning — welcome back to /AFK, the weekly roundup of the best and most interesting posts I read this past week:

• Elder Game — More on Classed vs. Unclassed Games
  “Imagine an MMO that made you redo everything every year. It’d be called ‘A Tale in the Desert’ and it might have a cult following, but would not be able to find the audience you probably imagine it would.”

• KIASA — True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic
  “Take her back to Ered Luin where she first began her journey, however, and she can hit a wolf so hard that there’s a very good chance a Higgs boson particle would be detected in the subsequent imploding bloody-mist of lupine limbs.”

• Game by Night — SOE floundering
  “Worse, I have serious concerns that DCUO will cause the industry to doubt the longevity of a console MMO.”

• A Casual Stroll to Mordor — Why is buying gold bad?
  “The gold buyer is stealing from everyone else in the game. He is not stealing their gold, but he is stealing their gold’s value.”

• Overly Positive — The Comfortable, Familiar MMO
  “To be perfectly honest, the good thing that an MMO with familiarity has for people that play it is simple comfort – the kind of comfort you get from a bath or shower at the right temperature, a familiar spot on the couch/recliner, or worn clothes that fit well.”

• ETCmmo — Four Little words
  “Taking things too seriously.”

• We Fly Spitfires — MMOs that make me squeal with anticipation
  “I’m starting to think about what new MMOs are lurking around the corner to tickle my fancy like some dirty old man in a trench coat.”

• Grimnir’s Grudge — Warhammer is the Detroit of MMOs
  “Fine, but what do we win? Why isn’t it something tangible? Where is the value in winning this? Did I really work hard for something?”

• TOROCAST.com — When customization is bad
  “Well, just like I can love gin & tonics but decidedly not love waking up mid-puke in a random parking lot in Milwaukee, too much customization has its drawbacks.”

• I Have Touched the Sky — Adventures in Telara: Rift Impressions
  “How do you know the story sucks if you don’t read it? Seriously, this sort of attitude torques me to no end.”

/AFK: Forumophobia Edition

Forumophobia: The mortal fear of going to — or posting on — an internet gaming forum due to the abundance of know-it-alls, trolls, malcontents, leet-speakers and 95% trash post rate.  How can we combat this people?  With lollipops, of course.  With LOLlipops.

Once again I bring you /AFK, my personal pick of the best or most interesting posts from this past week:

• Overly Positive — Getting Over the Forumophobia
  “But if there’s one constant among some of the reactions and thoughts I hear about online forums, it’s plain jane vanilla fear.”

• Ardwulf’s Lair — How LotRO Works
  “This is a world I know and am at home in, in a way that Norrath and Azeroth – and even Telon, which otherwise came closest – never were.”

• Elder Game — Why We Need More Women Developers
  “Magical woman knowledge.”

• ETCmmo.com — The Not-So Glorious Return to EverQuest
  “Is the risk worth it? Well, the whole game is pretty risky.”

• Wolfshead Online — Is Blizzard’s Cataclysm the Worst Expansion in MMO History?
  “Like some deranged madman bent on suicide, Blizzard has destroyed everything that was good and noble about MMOs and seemingly wants to take the entire genre with it into existential oblivion.”

• The Pink Pigtail Inn — The Honeymoon is Over for the Bitter Veterans
  “But when it comes to WoW it’s a little bit different. For some reason, those who are unhappy can’t just cancel their subscription and play another game that suites them better, which seems to be the logical thing to do.”

• MMO Gamer Chick — Oh, The Insanity!  My Thoughts on Amnesia: The Dark Descent
  “My husband, being closest to me at the time, fell prey to my impulses as I stormed into the living room, wide-eyed and holding myself and babbling about how creeped out I was.”

• Screaming Monkeys — The Cataclysmic WoW Disease
  “The game is suffering from a strange disease and we don’t know what it is. We see the victims, friends, family, bloggers, guild members who are quitting WoW after only a month and a half of Cataclysm.”

• Levelcapped — Naivete
  “Winzen should have released this mod to the community, as is intended to be done with mods, and garnered the accolades of an appreciative Internet. Instead, Winzen aimed higher. Much too high.”

• KIASA — A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence
  “What does the boar parry with? Its head? A foreleg? Because I hate to break it to people, but the fundamental idea behind a sword or axe is to go through unprotected legs and heads like a hot knife through a leg or head.”

• Werit — Where is Mythic?
  “What surprises me (and bothers me) is that Mythic has to know what kind of impression this lack of communication gives to the playerbase (well, the website/blog going part). Yet they don’t really do much about it.”

• Elder Game — Classes vs. Open Skill Systems
  “But if you accept this premise, you need to know what you’re doing here: you’re intentionally creating an illusion of complexity that will wear off in six months, tops. If it takes you twelve months to make it, you’re betting a LOT of resources on that illusion.”