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City of Heroes is still taking on players at a healthy rate, and remains one of the most well-loved games on the market. It doesn't work quite like some other games, though, and new players will find it useful to be aware of the differences. If you're used to games where the tank-healer-DPS trinity is dominant, then you'll have to unlearn, as the little green guy put it.

We've put together a crash course in the basics of CoH teaming. Inside, you'll find a breakdown of who tends to do what on a team, how the different Archetypes interrelate, and what to avoid if you want the team to gel together well. There's a lot of flexibility, and CoH is so forgiving that just about any character can solo, but when on a team there tend to be specific roles to fill. New players who are unsure of what sort of hero they'd like to play can check inside to find out what team position would suit them best.

In yesterday's meaty comment discussion that followed the news about Blizzard president Mike Morhaime's admission that Age of Conan stole away some World of Warcraft users, one Massively reader (Heraclea) brought up a very valid reason for leaving WoW -- "performance anxiety" in the endgame.

WoW is obviously not the only game with this problem; pretty much any MMO with a big raid focus (and maybe some others too) can be a bit too intimidating and demanding for folks who just want to play games to relax. This might be one essence of the hardcore/casual divide. Maybe hardcore types play to excel in competition, while casual players play just to unwind. Or maybe the problem is more complicated than that.

Let's get to the bottom of this! Are you turned off by raids because you get performance anxiety? If so, why do you think it happens to you? And for extra points (cause we totally keep track; okay, not really!): is there a way games can be designed differently so the endgame isn't so draining?

Our epic-level talk with Josh Drescher and Adam Gershowitz delved into a number of interesting topics. Warhammer Online is essentially feature complete, they said, and will offer players a level of UI customization we haven't seen in most previous MMOs. They also, interestingly, are working to take care of the looking for group problem with a new tactic: the Open Party. We've already learned how they plan to encourage players to collaborate through Public Quests, but this sounds like it's taking the boundary of solo and group play and stretching it to the breaking point ...

Adam: Another major feature we wanted to make sure to mention was the Open Party system. It just went into the Beta in the last couple of weeks. The Open Party system is an extension of the Looking For Group system. We have a fully fleshed out LFG system, but the Open Party system is really kind of an easier, casual way to put a group together. What the Open Party does is, say I come into the game and I'm interesting in forming a group. I go ahead and start the system, and it puts me into a party of one. It immediately updates me on the UI to be available for other players. As players are running around the world, they're going to get notification that there are Open Parties with slots in the area. On our Beta server right now, in most areas, there's anywhere from four to something like eighteen Open Parties for any given area. When you look on the UI you'll see it shows how many people are in a group, as well as the exact distance you are from the party.

The creators of the sci-fi MMO Earthrise have been very active in recent months -- granting a number of interviews, releasing monthly newsletters, and participating in dev chats. Stratics recently hosted the third Earthrise 'House of Commons' dev chat, with three members of the Masthead Studios team.

The Masthead Studios devs that took part were Atanas Atanasov (CEO of Masthead Studios), Apostol Apostolov (Lead Game Designer), and Moll (Community Manager). Their discussion ranged from the professions available to players to the extensive crafting system in the game. Read on after the jump for details straight from the devs about what we can expect from Earthrise.

Age of Conan has gotten an intense amount of exposure lately on virtually every site that covers games. You might have noticed. The influence of AoC is ever-present, burned into the retinas of most of the Massively team as they slash their way through Hyboria. The title seems to have breathed new life into massively multiplayer spheres, with people everywhere either talking about it, reading about it, or playing it. While the AoC launch went smoothly, this is not to say that the game itself is perfect.

Psychochild takes Age of Conan to task in his latest Weekend Design Challenge, for what he perceives to be a potential flaw in the game's design: much of the low-level experience, despite being a massively multiplayer title, is essentially a single-player game. He contends that the point of online games is to interact with people in one way or another, but the difference between instances in AoC is literally night and day. Night quests give personal instances that are wholly isolated from other players. This creates a split where daytime quests are multiplayer; night quests are single player. While a benefit is that players can opt for the night quests to take on their own spawns unchallenged by competitors, doesn't this defeat the purpose of AoC even being an MMO title?

A mind, once opened, can never be shut again.
-- Alfred Einstein

Have you ever wondered how the other half lives? Maybe you're a tank, and know the intricacies of threat and mitigation inside and out, but can't figure out what those finger-wigglers at the back are going on about. Or perhaps you're a sniper, and don't care about what goes on in the melee fracas.

When the game itself runs out of challenges for you, and you're not ready to move on, it becomes time to challenge ourselves. We may not be ready or willing to move to another virtual world altogether -- we've got friends in a guild that we want to keep playing with, for example, not to mention all the sparkly toys we've accrued. If you've gotten too good at your primary role, and keep frequent company with a group who is likewise adept at what they do, it can be easy to grow complacent. There are ways to spice things up once in a while, by doing themed events, or partaking in certain vices. But these are temporary measures, more the exception than the rule.

To truly push ourselves, we need to step fully clear from what we've mastered. For some folks, it may be sidling around from the bad guy's face to their back, or trading in some brass knuckles for a crossbow. For me, it meant wading into the thick of the fray, rather than lobbing damage or healing from a more-or-less safe distance. In this spirit, I wanted to learn what those sneaky guys at the top of the damage charts were up to.

How hard could it be, right?

We've all been there. Any little thing can start it. Maybe the tank messes up and pulls two groups when he meant to pull one. Maybe the healer was distracted by his cat and some people die. Maybe the mage doesn't watch her aggro and the mobs take out the DPS. Something happens, and the group wipes. The seed of doubt is planted: Can this group really pull this dungeon off? Am I grouped with a bunch of idiots? How big is my repair bill going to be tonight?

It's like watching a chain of dominoes. Sometimes, the group can laugh off a wipe or two. But if a simple mistake turns into a pattern of someone screwing up, or if luck goes against you and you have a few simple mistakes in a row, people start losing their morale. Suddenly, people aren't using their consumables (why bother when you're just going to die again?). The tanks and healers get frustrated and start getting sloppy. The DPS gets angry and starts getting cocky. Everyone thinks everyone else is a moron, and each pull is a little less likely to succeed than the last. Each wipe spirals you further down. Finally, people start having mysterious "emergencies" and have to leave the group (do a /who check to see them farming somewhere in 30 minutes). You might not realize it, but your group's morale is hugely important to your success.

People who love MMOs tend to cite the fun of social, shared play as the reason. It's more fun to play together than alone. However, at the higher levels, when it becomes necessary to group just to stand a chance of completing a raid or instance, it becomes difficult to find a group of players of the same level as you -- unless you're already at the highest level you can attain. One thing to be said about reaching the ceiling is that you can stop worrying about leveling and concentrate on some good, solid 'endgame' content with a bunch of like-minded players.

This begs the question: is all game content merely there to help you get to the endgame, at which time the fun truly begins? When you're bored with your top-level character, and you roll a new one, do you grit your teeth and sigh expressively through the lower-level content until you're back up on top? Once you've reached the heights, is the rest of the game still fun?

The latest developer diary at the Lord of the Rings Online site provides a detailed rundown of the fellowing and quest log improvements that will be included with Book 13. The quest log itself will be getting a face-lift, but the proposed changes aren't just skin-deep. One of the handy new features will let you see which step group-mates are up to in a particular quest chain, and also if they are ready to hand in a quest (as noted in the diary, the constant spamming of fellow chat with quest completion status will be a thing of the past).

As well as these things, actually finding people to help with a quest should be a great deal easier, with a feature that will allow you to flag a quest with a new "Find a Fellowship" button. Other people that have the same quest flagged will be able to see that you're interested and easily get together. From what we can tell, it sounds like you will only be able to flag a single quest at a time, which is a little disappointing, but it's still an excellent feature.

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Incorporating an unusual player into a team, group, raid, guild, or alliance, whether it's the players themselves or their character's execution that are unusual, is a lot like cooking with a new ingredient. Sure, it'll change the flavor, and it may not be to everyone's liking, but a lot of times, it'll freshen up an established mix in new and exciting ways.

The Tabula Rasa community team sent out another bulletin this Friday, specifically concerning the changes that should be coming to the public test server some time between now and next week. Among the tweaks they mentioned for patch 1.7 are tweaks to the way enemy spawns and high-level AI is handled. In the Palisades, Torden Incline, and the Plains, they're looking to smooth out enemy spawn patterns, in addition to alleviating some of the tougher spots in Divide and Wilderness, where enemies that you just finished killing will often pop right back in and shoot you in the back.

They also mentioned some exciting changes the group mechanics, including the clan owned CPs (finally!) and some a new LFG system that should make the quest to find a group considerably less arduous, or so we hope. Tabula Rasa still strikes us as a solo-centric game, so we'd like to see group play pushed to the forefront, even if it means they have to beat us over the head with it.

Also, one final announcement for the especially dense among us: the Skitterin hybrid class was an April Fools' joke!

What word is perhaps most synonymous with the current MMO playing field? Grind. Realtime Worlds' Dave Jones (no relation?) is setting out to change that with the studio's first massively multiplayer title All Points Bulletin we've been following eagerly. He's hoping the formula Crackdown + MMO = crack will be proven true with variables like infinite, professional-looking character and vehicle customization, contemporary setting, integration with last.fm and dynamic, variable team-sized missions hidden in the equation. Hit up our symbiotic other selves at Joystiq for the complete overview of APB.

In keeping with today's P.U.G. theme, we stumbled across another article today about how to find and enjoy the community in Tabula Rasa. Given the brouhaha over TR yesterday, we thought shinning a spotlight on this fun MMO would be beneficial.

This helpful article (found on Tabula Blogger) provides an entire footlocker full of chat commands (i.e., "/whisper" sends a message to specific a player, "/group" or "/party" sends a message to your party, "/shout" or "/yell" sends a message to the map you're on) and suggestions on how to go about finding fellow AFS soldiers in the fight against the vile Bane. I've been playing this game since beta (and apparently have a far better outlook on TR than other people), yet I have never used the LFG (Looking For Group) Tab. Heck, I forgot it's there to be quite honest. But then, I'm not usually looking for groups (which is a whole other post I'm working on). However, if you are then it's where you need to be to find a group quick and easy like.

Leading a group in a dungeon instance can often feel like herding cats, especially if you're playing with a pick-up-group (PUG). Unlike a guild group you don't have the luxury of knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the other players. PUGs also tend to have more members with less experience running the instance. Many instances I've run in World of Warcraft have involved at least one of the following situations: The huntard claims he must be the official puller and then won't shed the aggro to let the main tank do his job. The healer blows all his mana on the soft targets that shouldn't have aggro. The priest or warlock freaks out and fears off the mobs who flee to their comrades in waiting, join forces, and eat the reckless noobs stumbling through their dungeon.

No matter how good a player you are personally, you can't save a group from the four other morons that make up your party. Maybe once or twice you'll get off a group saving heal, or manage to get the aggro back onto yourself if you're a tank. Nine times out of ten, though, when the same craziness happens on the next pull, it's a wipe. So imagine my surprise when I joined up a with a group of total noobs to run the Blackrock Depths instance in WoW, and managed to finish most of my quests and take down nearly all the bosses with only one wipe. This was a group of extremely inexperienced players. Besides myself, only one other person there had even run the instance before. Because we were both on alts that hadn't seen this content in a long time, neither of us really remembered the details. So how can a group succeed when it doesn't have experience? How could this be possible when I'd run the same instance with veterans and higher level characters with less success?

People! That's right, I'm talking to you people about, well, you people. To be more clear, what I'm talking about is the social interaction people experience (or don't) in massively games and the discussion that's been going on about it. Ethic at Kill Ten Rats has a very good write-up about his thoughts on the matter, as does Tobold in response to Ethic's post. After reading both of them and the comments within, I can't help but throw my hat into the ring of discourse.

Part of the problem is player attitude, but we all know John Gabriel's Greater Internet F@$!wad Theory. There isn't much that can be done about that issue, so the best solution is to find the core of the problem within the games themselves.

At the core, the issue is about soloing and how it has become the de facto design focus for most developers. One of the few development teams who seem to be focusing on new group experiences and powerful guild tools is EA Mythic. A point Ethic makes in his post is that developers should be focusing on giving people reasons to really want to group together. I fully agree with that sentiment, but don't get me wrong when it comes to solo play. The solo experience is important as well, but it is not the essence of a massively multiplayer game.