Chris "Syeric" Coke

August 18, 2010

Gamescom 2010 brings us two videos this week from the MMO big’uns: TOR and Guild Wars 2. Both of them have been met with some mixed reception but, from where I’m sitting, there’s cause to get excited. Let’s start with the space combat video from TOR. Here, if you haven’t seen it yet, have a …

Tags: bioware, combat animations, gamescom 2010, guild wars, Guild Wars 2, guild wars 2 gameplay, gw, GW2, mmo combat, snes, star wars the old republic, starfox, sw:tor space combat is like Starfox for the SNES, swtor

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One New Raid, One New Guild: Or, There’s Life Left in WoW For Me Yet!

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August 17, 2010

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you probably know that I’ve been feeling a little topped out on WoW lately. I was stuck in the heroic rut without much hope of getting out. This week has been a roller coaster ride as I’ve struggled to pull myself out. Thankfully, it looks like …

Tags: 10 man raiding, blizzard, experiences, guilds, player organizations, raiding, tanking, toc, toc 10, trial of the crusader, World of Warcraft, wow

Darkfall Combat is NOT So Special.

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August 16, 2010

We’re starting this Monday out on a more sour note, I guess. Sorry for that. This got to me over the weekend, enough to inspire a whole post. You’ve probably seen Darkfall players talk crap about action bar MMOs. Yeah, well, they’re full of crap. Here’s why: There’s a common theme that runs in posts …

Tags: abilities, action bars, aventurine, click to swing, combat, darkfall, dfo, fighting, forumfall, timers

a. MMORPG, d. Everything Else

I’m Making the Leap: Starcraft 2

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August 15, 2010

Fun Fact: disabling P2P in the SC2 downloader can increase your download speeds more than 4x! And with that, I come to terms with the fact that I just spent $65 on an RTS. That’s a big leap from the previous $0 I’d ever spent on the genre beforehand. But, the internet has spoken, and …

Tags: blizzard, real time strategy, rts, sc, sc2, sc2 tips and tricks, starcraft, starcraft 2

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Fishing in FFXIV – FINALLY Fishing Done Right

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August 12, 2010

It may sound silly, but one of the first things I got excited about when I decided to try WoW was the fishing. As a kid, I grew up with an outdoorsman father. We’d go out fishing together in real life, and then I’d come home and while away the hours with any of the …

Tags: ffxiv, ffxiv classes, ffxiv professions, ffxiv's fisherman class, Final Fantasy 14, fisherman, fishing, se, snes, square enix

What Makes a Success?

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August 9, 2010

Over the last few years, we’ve seen an absolute explosion in the amount of MMOs being released. A lot of them came about purely because WoW was such a success. The result, it seems, is that these games are being measured against WoW to determine if they’re successful or not. Now, I think we can …

Tags: Aion, Aion Online, blizzard, business, defining a success, Lord of the Rings Online, LotRO, mmo subscription numbers, mmog charts, profitability, subscription numbers, success or failure, what makes a success, World of Warcraft, wow

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SAR: Appreciating the Industry

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August 7, 2010

Update: Whoops! Might help if I included a link. Fixed! The lack of Friday post disturbs me. What’s that? It’s Saturday? Better late than never! The good news is I’m not lazy. I’ve actually been writing a Friday post every week for a couple months! See, the fine gentleman at Lagwar saw fit to offer …

Tags: blogging, comments, developers, development, industry, lagwar, plugs, sar, some assembly required, video game development

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They Listened!

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d. Everything Else

August 6, 2010

… well, the scammers did anyways. Greetings! This is an automated notification regarding the recent change(s) Our goal is to make the experience may be the most blizzard games, so we hope to get epic of your feedback for registered users of world of warcraft. We invite you to join an online survey in your …

Tags: account hacks, gold sellers, scammers, spam

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Is Rift’s Emergent Gameplay Just Reskinned PQs?

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August 5, 2010

Forgive my ignorance here, because I haven’t been following Rift too closely. I just found this developer diary on YouTube where they talk about some of their neat plans for the game. One of the bigguns is the rift system. Actually, considering they’ve named the game after it, I’d say it’s probably how they’re trying …

Tags: bioware, emergent gameplay, mythic entertainment, mythic-bioware, pqs, public quests, PvE, questing, rift, rift: planes of telara, trion worlds, war, warhammer online

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Adult Themes in MMOs – Selling Point or Limiting Factor?

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August 4, 2010

Psychochild has an interesting article up this morning dealing with the problems of sex in MMOs. Essentially, it boils down to America not being ready to accept sex out in the open; we’re too prudish to accept and express our sexuality, so any game emphasizing it is destined to fail. I wouldn’t argue with this, …

Tags: adult themes, age of conan, allods online, funcom, i. MMORPG, nudity, Sex, sex in MMOs, violence