Blizzard posts

While our sister site, WoW.com, gets the lion's share of World of Warcraft screenshots for their daily Around Azeroth column, we do still get the occasional screenshot from a player -- albeit few and far between! Today's overlook screenshot comes to us from occasional contributor Deadend from the Exodar server, who writes in: Here is Mimiron's joint. Mimiron is, from a game play standpoint, probably one of my all time favorite bosses in WoW.

If you're one of the millions of players who have played World of Warcraft and would like to send in a screenshot, we'd welcome your contribution. All you need to do is email a screenshot to us at oneshots AT massively DOT com along with your name, and a quick description of what's WoWing you in the screenshot. Please make sure your image is at least 1024 pixels wide and has as little visible UI as possible. Yours may be next!

Love is in the air in World of Warcraft and the event has completely changed this year over previous years. WoW.com has the latest on this Valentine's Day-themed event.

• Fool for Love Achievement: If you are into holiday achievements, the Overachiever guide has all of the details.
• Love is in the air FAQ: Answers any event questions you may have.
• New Boss Loot: The list of the loot from the three new bosses. Naughty, naughty loot.

But WoW is not the only MMO that has an event going on now or soon:

• Spring Fling in City of Heroes
• City of Heroes also has a Secret Admirer's contest
• A chocolate related Valentine's event begins Tuesday in 4Story.
• Valentione's Day in Final Fantasy XI
• Lover's Jubilee in Lineage II
• MapleStory has become a world of romance.
• Double experience next weekend for Aion.
• Valentine's Day UStream event for all SOE games on Friday, February 12th, which includes EverQuest, EverQuest II, Free Realms, Planetside, and Star Wars Galaxies.

Which MMO do you think does this romantic holiday best?

Is All Points Bulletin the "Next Big Thing" in MMOs? While I'm fully aware that Realtime Worlds doesn't specifically prefer to associate the game with this genre, it's very much a part of it -- but it also orbits the fringes of what we commonly refer to as a massively multiplayer online game.

Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2 and All Points Bulletin come from a different school of business models. These games hinge on the idea that most people dislike coughing up 15 bucks a month to keep playing their favorite title. Just look to the success of the original Guild Wars, having a year ago passed six million copies sold. That's a pretty great start for non-subscription MMOs, and because of that success we now have GW's sequel and APB on the way.

There's a lot of unrest over on the official forums concerning Cryptic's choice to add a skill cap to Star Trek Online. As of this writing the thread containing the meat of this discussion is well over 6,000 replies and 111,000 views. As I look through this arguably epic thread, the primary question that continually crosses my mind is: Really, this much upset over such a minor piece of news?

Yes, I said minor.

Back in the old days of MMO playing you had to hope that something dropped for you when a boss tipped over and gave up his precious loot. It was all about the luck of the draw -- praying that the rare items, first of all, dropped and then, second of all, were for you.

But, as we continued forwards with our game design, Blizzard came up with the idea of giving every player involved in downing a boss a token. If a player participated enough, they were guaranteed to get something -- even if the luck of the draw was not on their side. This became a controversial topic for some, as accusations of "welfare epics" began to fly around.

Today, Grinders, we're going to briefly revisit this topic. Do you prefer games that come down to the luck of the draw when loot drops, or do you prefer the new token system instated by World of Warcraft? Talk, discuss, and feel free to battle it out. Opinions, go!

Yes, that looks like a typo in the subject line and it ought to be "a little goes a long way." It isn't. Little itself goes a long way in making a community, as discussed in this recent post by Eric Heimburg. Speaking from his experiences both on Asheron's Call 2 as a producer and Aion as a player, his core contention is that smaller communities decrease anonymity and make politeness far more common for interactions among strangers.

One of the core reasons behind this is the question of reliance. The community of group-based games tends to be stonger than that of games where you can be almost wholly independent, since you rely upon others to work with you. By way of contrast, examine some of the behavior found in World of Warcraft's random dungeon tool, where you find yourself working with people whom you're statistically unlikely to ever see again.

One of the laments about solo-friendly games is the death of community, and while that's not altogether true, Heimburg's post certainly makes a number of compelling points. Well worth examining if you're interested in building a community or just in the ways groups develop.

So, it's late night on Wednesday night, I just got done watching Top Gear, and I need something to write about. Lucky for me that Blizzard has given me the perfect topic -- MMO privacy. Thanks to a new development in their World of Warcraft Armory program, privacy advocates are up in arms and I've got a topic to discuss.

For all those of you who may be late to the game, Blizzard is adding RSS feeds to the Armory. Basically, the Armory will now report on the exact time you do an "Armory worthy" activity, such as boss kills, achievements, item pickups, and more. People can subscribe to your RSS feed, so then they know exactly when you do something in World of Warcraft.

This has, of course, sent privacy advocates into a tailspin of anger. There's no opt-out button for the Armory, so your playing style in World of Warcraft is going to be exposed whether you like it or not. The topic has even spawned a 59+ page thread on the European forums!

So what's my take on it? Well, I'm glad you asked. Here at Anti-Aliased, I've got nothing to hide.

We might fight a lot of enemies in our MMOs, but a number of players will agree that there's one enemy that is bigger than anything else: the company that makes the game. Blizzard, Square-Enix, Funcom, Bioware -- according to this branch of the playerbase, they don't care at all about the people playing their game. All they're concerned about is making money. They just want to get your money by any means necessary.

However, the people who claim that say that like it's a bad thing.

Nobody ever smiles and says "boy, I'm sure glad Sony Online Entertainment is in this for the money." Oddly enough, when you start to think about it, the fact of the matter is that it's not only transparent that these companies are in it for the money, it's a good thing. We should be happy that most of these companies are there to get our money by any means necessary.

We love it when game designers make an observation that sometimes escapes us, like Dusty Monk's insightful post about the issue surrounding starting zones -- specifically in Cryptic Studio's last three games. His problem stems from the way in which the developer is responding to gamers' demands of a starting zone experience that doesn't involve a newly minted character thwacking sickly rabbits with a twig. It's an old -- almost passe -- gripe that was well founded back in the first half of the 00's.

As many of you no doubt know, City of Villains, Champions Online and Star Trek Online tutorials all begin by inundating the character with chaotic immediacy, and information. Dusty's problem is the combination of these two elements. He posits that any sense of urgency is killed immediately upon the opening of a substantially novella-like text window. On the flip side of that problem, he contends that it's tough to learn a new system(s) while a Hollywoood blockbuster is taking place around you.

And like any good person with an opinion, he's got a solution for the problem, too.

When you're going to make a statement, you may as well make it a good one, right? Well, Blizzard CEO Paul Sams has delivered in that regard. Speaking with Gamesindustry.biz (a free account is required to read the whole article) Sams went on to make a bevy of remarks that reinforce the developer's stance of, "It's done when it's done." while also commenting on the "devastating" effects of shipping an unfinished product.

So what gets devastated? The people who put in all those long hours of hard work, says Sams. We believe it, too. This kind of issue is bad for any game, but for an MMO we can only begin to imagine the sort of downtrodden emotions that can permeate a dev team after seeing their work pushed out into the world before it's ready. And while we all know MMOs are living, breathing things that are never "Finished." there's still a point where more gestation time is far better than getting pushed out the door prematurely.

When we recently said we didn't get very many World of Warcraft screenshots, a few readers heard the call and decided to send in some truly lovely images to us. Today's One Shots is one such screenshot that we received from Michelyne of the Caelestrasz (US Oceanic) server. She wrote in to tell us a bit more of the scene: My recent best shot is when I was doing The Purification of Quel'Delar at Sunwell Plateau - part of the Quel'Delar chain quest. I was lucky to win the Battered Hilt on the first day, during my first run after the patch! This quest sent me back to Sunwell plateau, and the chamber is absolutely beautiful! I'll recommend the player who gets this item, don't sell them (even they are selling like 12K+ on my server) -- do this quest! You will be stunned by the amazing experience. It comes with an achievement too!

We love to hear about fun moments while out gaming - and if they're in beautiful areas, all the better! Just snag a screenshot and send it in to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com along with your name, the name of the game, and a quick description. We'll post it out here and give you the credit.

Anyone even slightly in touch with the MMO community is aware that account security has been an even bigger concern than usual for the past few months. While it's more in the forefront of everyone's mind these days, it's important to remember that this isn't a brand new problem. It's very important for people on both sides of a game -- both the player side and the development side -- to work to make player accounts as safe as possible.

Steven Davis, CEO of SecurePlay and the mind behind PlayNoEvil, has been watching the events with interest and spent some time recently talking to us about his take on the situation as well as overall account security. Follow along after the jump and see what he had to say.

Socialization is dead!

Isn't it?

Well actually, that's a tough one. Certainly, the perception that socialization is becoming a lesser factor to more and more developers has become the norm among most people. That doesn't necessarily mean they're correct. So, let's examine the general landscape of yesteryear and beyond to see what's really going on when it comes to human interaction in our massively multiplayer online games.

Both EVE Online and World of Warcraft now offer a high quality official magazine to anyone interested. Is this going to become a trend? Sure, you could argue that World of Warcraft's immense subscriber base supports such a venture, but what about the considerably smaller (although no less dedicated) EVE Online base? That game has seemingly started this whole business of MMO magazines and EON is still around and kicking.

It seems to us that producing something of this nature would appeal to players of several other MMOs, so long as the price matched the quality. So our question to you is: What game would you want a magazine for, how much would you pay, how often would you require it to arrive (monthly, bi-monthly, etc) and what type of quality would you expect?

As we reported back in November, there have been rumors of a Call of Duty MMOFPS floating around for a while now. With nothing more than a rumor to hold on to at that time, we filed that nugget away in the corner of our brains and went on about our business. However, it appears that another rumor about Infinity Ward looking in the direction of MMOs has bubbled up -- this time on Destructoid. Apparently the current word from industry insiders is that they are targeting and hiring away MMO developers from Sony Online Entertainment.

If these rumors are true, the resultant game could be the source of many fanboy head-explosions -- and we're not talking headshots. Hiring SOE's developers gives IW a ready-made team that is very familiar with the nuts and bolts of coding MMOs. Add to it the rabid fanbase tied to the Call of Duty franchise, and mix in the fact that Infinity Ward is owned by Activision Blizzard, and you can see where we're going with this. Could a Call of Duty MMO be the super-secret MMOFPS that Blizzard is involved with? Is this why SOE has started working on PlanetSide 2: to compete with a potential MMOFPS hybrid from Infinity Ward, Blizzard, and their own ex-employees? While it's all rumor right now, and thus anyone's guess, it certainly makes for a potentially tasty batch of kool-aid.

[Edited to add] Alan "Brenlo" Crosby, Executive Producer for EverQuest II contacted us to let us know that the rumor about the Lead Developer for EverQuest II going to Infinity Ward is absolutely false. He suggested that the rumor may have instead started since previous SOE Lead Developers Jon L. Davis and Rick Baker are working at Infinity Ward currently. So while it seems that current SOE people are off the table, it certainly doesn't stop the potential of a CoD MMO -- especially with talented ex-SOE employees already in-house over at Infinity Ward.

[via Joystiq]