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MMO bloggers Keen and Graev have published the first episode of their Age of Conan podcast. Well, it's the first if you don't count the open beta special they did earlier this month, anyway.

In this episode, they talk about their impressions of the game during its Early Access period, from Tortage to the Wilds. They also describe the performance and stability improvements Funcom has managed to make since the rather troubled open beta event. It sounds like the duo generally has positive feelings about AoC's post-launch existence so far, but a few criticisms are raised about things like the user interface and the way the game's world is pieced together.

The conversation is an honest intro to the state of Hyboria at the moment; it's worth a listen whether you're already playing AoC or still sitting on the fence.

It's a little disconcerting to be told that your game genre of choice, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, is the last refuge of people who more or less play games in their sleep, unable to hack the action of a REAL game. As played by REAL gamers. Who are not us. How does AT Wire's Alex Taldren come by this startling conclusion? Keen of Keen and Graev's posted recently that Age of Conan's combo-based melee system just replaces a single keystroke with five, and that gamers will soon automate combos with macros or smart keyboards back to one key only.

This was the moment when Taldren threw up his hands and admitted something that should have been clear given his upright posture and relatively hairless body: He was not originally an MMO gamer. In fact, he had come from the realm of first person shooters, and looks in on us scratching his head and watching MMO gamers "wiping their asses with leaves". This is a man who loves his keystrokes with a fiery passion. And why aren't MMO gamers real gamers? Writes Taldren, "MMO gamers are people who generally don't enjoy playing their games."

There it is. Real gamers play because they love playing games. We MMO gamers play MMOs because we don't ... like ... games? We have to admit to some confusion. Maybe Alex will stop by and clear this up.

[Via MMO Gamers]

Pirates of the Burning Sea has received its first patch (and whaddaya know, even before it actually gets released). Preorder-ers got to start playing last week, and apparently there are already a few fixes that need to go in.

As you might guess, it's mostly a stability patch, although a few exploits were fixed as well (there was one where you could stack buffs and become invincible. Lower level missions were also retuned-- apparently there were too many missions in the beta that were too low, so FLS has tweaked those up a notch. Bam! Keen loves this change, but he would-- he loves everything PotBS (I kid! Keen's actually been doing a great job covering the game).

The only other change of note is that FLS "removed text we thought might offend the ESRB." That's not piratical behavior! When you're a pirate, you don't worry about what landlubbers think! You say what's on yer mind, and damned be the consequences!

Our own Tateru Nino has been covering Dream of Mirror Online pretty well (both with a nice hands-on and coverage of the problems with EU players), and now Keen (of Keen and Graev) has written up a few of his own impressions of the game as well. He doesn't go nearly as in-depth as Tateru's hands-on (just mentions that there are a few "kill x boars pigs" quests), but he does talk about how the cel-shading and stylization of the graphics is a real boost for the game, both in terms of playability (the low system requirements are great for pulling in casual players) and in terms of feel. Both Tateru and Keen felt that the world was really alive with characters and story.

My original concern with the game was that the gameplay would end up "as cutesy as the graphics are," but according to what we've heard, it's actually pretty in-depth. Anyone else given the world of DOMO a try?

Keen (of Keen and Graev) has a great post up about what he calls "mudflation" (a combination of the words MUD and inflation). If you've been playing any MMO through the introduction of an expansion, you'll know exactly what he's talking about. That shiny bit of loot you worked for weeks to obtain doesn't look quite so hot when players are grabbing an even better piece from a quick five-minute quest.

Truth be told, "mudflation" isn't actually a bad thing. Change is inherent to MMOs, and it's unavoidable that just as the bar will raise (there will be new heights for players to climb to), so will the minimum rise as well. Mudflation is actually a good thing for the majority of players by definition-- if you consider players as a normal distribution, with a small number of players at the top of the endgame, and a small number of players just entering the endgame, "mudflation" is actually that swell of players in the middle getting their hands on some really new items.

There is a problem, however, with mudflation that I haven't really seen an MMO skillfully deal with yet-- what happens to the content made obsolete? Whenever an expansion comes through town, the old worlds and content get more or less abandoned. While the newest players may still find a little bit of joy in discovering "the old world," they too eventually learn to abandon it for the greener pastures brought with the new content. Mudflation is all well and good for the folks picking up the new shiny items, but it's too bad that MMO makers haven't come up with a better plan for making old content relevant to new players.