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When you hear the words "power leveling," which country do you usually think of? The term almost always conjures images of digital content factories in China, where teams of workers grind around the clock for the legions of gamers out there who are willing to pay to get ahead.

Power leveling and gold farming are by no means limited to China though. Other countries in Asia are seeing a marked increase in these activities as internet access becomes more ubiquitous, and of course as broadband speeds increase. PlayNoEvil points out an article from Vietnam News, which reports "game addicts with talent can now indulge in their favourite pastime and be paid up to VND 2.7 million (US$ 160) a month for doing it." PlayNoEvil notes that the salary of a power-leveler is greater than that of a teacher, who only earns between US$ 60 and US$ 100 per month.

Via PlayNoEvil

Lord of the Rings Online has revealed their newest content patch, Book 14, on the preview servers this week. This is very exciting news, as it means we can try out the newest game changes before Book 14 hits the live servers.

We realize that sometimes downloading what is essentially an entirely new game for the sake of previewing content may not be your cup of tea, so we've put together this extensive visual guide to let you know just how useful this preview server can be. For example, did you know that you can instantly level to 20, 30, 40 or 50 quiet easily? Did you know that you can max out all reputation, renown, infamy, Book quests, traits and more just as easily? You will also get a full range of top-level items and gold to begin your journey. This server is not only great for trying out the new content for an upcoming Book, but it is also perfect for trying out other classes at max level to see if they're really something you want to pursue throughout the game. This applies to both regular characters and Monster players as well!

Most of us have spent a lot of time playing our favorite games. Chances are good that unless you're totally new to the MMOG world, you've got at least one character at some ridiculously high level, armed to the teeth, sitting on a big pile of gold amongst the trophies of your slaughtered foes. You might even be part of a guild and still play that character with your guildmates on a regular basis to go topple foes of ever-increasing power. It's good to be a dragon-slaying, world-destroying, gold-hoarding demigod of awesomeness.

That's why it's so tough to start over, sometimes. Whether it's rolling up an alt on your current game or picking up an entirely new game, it can be really frustrating to go from a bloodthirsty, battle-hardened warrior who wades into combat swinging an enormous, glowing two-handed sword to some level 1 nobody with a leather jerkin and a knife. All of your accomplishments on your old character seem pretty far away when level 3 wolves are having you for a light afternoon snack, and a brand new grind stretches out interminably before you. Is it any wonder why plenty of players don't even bother with having alts and stick to the game they like?

I've been playing Age of Conan a fair amount over the last week, trying to figure out if I like it well enough to continue paying for it on a monthly basis after my free month expires. The problem is that it's going to be my second MMOG -- the one I play when I'm not busy farming or raiding with my guild on World of Warcraft. Even for someone who writes about videogames professionally, when you start stacking up multiple subscriptions, things get pricey pretty fast. Usually, I keep two subs active at a time and write about what I'm playing.

Anyway, I've been trying to make this decision and I have a problem: I hop classes a lot. When you're talking about a 250 hour investment, you want to make sure that you pick a class you enjoy playing. To figure out what you enjoy playing, you really just have to try the classes out -- especially when the classes are as unique as the ones in Age of Conan. I've leveled two characters to the high teens in Tortage, and several more to the 10ish range. What I've decided, after doing all of this poking around with the classes, is that AoC's first 20 levels are about as frustrating as they can be once the initial sheen of "new game wonder" wears off. If you didn't notice it your first time through, just wait until you make your first alt.

I was reading through my usual round-up of blogs and news items this morning when I found an interesting post by Van Hemlock on the topic of levels in MMORPGs. More specifically, it was about how levels in games keep players from playing with each other. He discusses how ever since he started gaming in 1999, being a different level than the people he wants to play with has kept him from playing with them. Whether you're too high for the content to be challenging or too low to be effective, playing with your friends at different levels just never seems to work very well.

Van Hemlock makes an excellent point, and it's a problem in almost every single MMOG out there with two notable exceptions: EverQuest 2 and City of Heroes/Villains. Both of these games recognize the problem and attempt to circumvent it, but they do it in very different ways. In City of Heroes, you can move either up or down in level so that you can see high level content at low levels or go back and do low level content as a high level player and still advance. In EverQuest 2, it's strictly one-way. You can bring yourself down to your friend's level and adventure with them for alternate advancement experience. Is this really as big of a problem as people make it out to be, and if it is, why don't more games have systems like these?

It's going to take you 250 hours to get to level 80 in Age of Conan. That's the big news today, and I'm not sure exactly how I feel about that. On the one hand, that tells us very little about the actual game. Saying you have 250 hours of content means nothing unless that content is fun content. On the other, it does let you know exactly what you're getting into as far as a time commitment goes (on average). It's also important to note that that's pretty close to World of Warcraft's benchmark, too -- most players can get from 1-70 in 6 to 14 days played. I think my first 70 took me about 7 and 1/2 days.

What's a good length of time for the leveling game to be, anyway? If you make it too long and drawn out, won't many players quit in frustration before they ever get to the top (EverQuest was notorious for having players that never capped)? Maybe. Let them level too quickly, though, and they'll quit if there's nothing to do at the top. Even if there is something to do when you're capped, for many people, leveling is the game. I'm probably one of those people. I hate structured PvP (like arenas) and while I dabble in raiding, I really have more fun leveling. So is 250 hours long enough to keep you interested? And why even tell us that in the first place? What does Age of Conan's 250 hours mean to you?

Age of Conan game director Gaute Godager said at the launch event in Norway that reaching level 80 will take "on average 250 hours of gameplay," according to videogamer.com.

The first few levels will come lightning fast, but the bulk of them up to 60 will be comprised of between two and three hours of gameplay. After that, it will get a bit slower, thanks to some input from beta testers. By our math, that leaves five hours per level including and after 60, but who knows how that will be distributed.

Whether this ends up being faster than competing games like World of Warcraft and The Lord of the Rings Online by the end probably depends on your play-style. He said "on average," so does that mean the hardcore achievers will reach the top in 90 hours and the casuals will mosey on up there within 500 hours? There's been a lot of chit chat and speculation in the Massively office about this news. We suppose we'll get a good sense of it by midway through the summer.

Last week's explosion of news about Blizzard's in-development Wrath of the Lich King expansion revealed a number of interesting design choices. Overall, the company seems to be refocusing World of Warcraft to a more casual-friendly experience. 5- and 10- man instances will be the main thrust of the endgame, Death Knights offer a viable "leg up" for players wanting to quest with their friends on other servers, and possible plans to offer interesting extensions of the recruit-a-friend service.

In an interview with TenTonHammer, Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton have revealed that another element will aid this design direction. Certain high level encounters may provide characters with so-called "Legacy Items". These items (weapons and armor, we assume) will bind to your player account - not to your specific character. The items can then transfer between different characters on your account, via the in-game mail system. Intriguingly, it sounds as if there will be no level restriction on this amazing loot. Said Kaplan, "They're deliberately created as twink items ... so you can be deliberately overpowered for a low level character to help level up or whatever."

Make sure to check out the interview for more on the company's design intentions, hints at a "Kick off to Northrend" world event, and more reassurances that the Death Knight won't break the game.

The behaviorists were like the orcs of psychology. Limited in vision, arrogant, belligerent and intolerant, they ruled the world of scientific psychology with an iron fist from the 1920s through the 1950s. Many of them were very capable scientists, however, and much of their work, especially in their signature area of learning, has stood the test of time. The behaviorists' biggest mistake lay in insisting that the principles of learning they discovered provided a complete and thorough explanation of what people do and why they do it. They thought they had the whole story. They didn't. They only had part of the story but it was an important part. We don't want to make the same mistake the behaviorists made and think their learning theories fully explain what we see people do in MMOs. But we also don't want to ignore the very powerful effects the principles of learning they discovered are having in every successful MMO on the market because when you get right down to it, games like World of Warcraft couldn't be better conditioning engines if they had been designed by B.F. Skinner himself.

Behaviorist learning theory is commonly know as operant conditioning and it is based on the simple idea that actions that are accompanied by good, pleasant, or desirable outcomes are more likely to be repeated while actions that are accompanied by outcomes that are bad, unpleasant or undesirable are less likely to be repeated. In other words, actions that are rewarded are likely to recur and actions that are punished are not. People didn't need the behaviorists to tell them this; the behaviorists' contributions were to clearly distinguish between different kinds of rewards and punishments and to demonstrate how each had different effects on what people do and how they do it. The behaviorists called the learning procedure that has the largest effect on how we play MMOs positive reinforcement. This type of learning occurs whenever a person does something and gets something they enjoy or value as a result. When people are positively reinforced, they are more likely to repeat or continue the action they were doing when they were rewarded and MMOs shower their players with positive reinforcement.

For your own positive reinforcement on this topic, read on.

Click. 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 5, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 5, 1, 1, 3, 4, 1. /cheer

Sitting next to my friend in his room littered with Diet Mountain Dew cans, reports past due, and his girlfriend passed out on the bed, I slowly came to a very scary realization. Some of our best loved MMOs can be boiled down to not just pressing different buttons, but pressing the same button repeatedly.

What really drove this home was me and a bunch of his friends were in the other room adjacent to his room, yet he was neglecting to join our roleplaying session and hang out. He'd rather sit in his small, cluttered room and farm a raid he's done at least 20 times, somehow finding enjoyment from pressing the button "1" repeatedly.

So... what are we doing? Are we drinking the proverbial Windex because someone said it was a good idea?

Over at Eurogamer, there was someone who felt the pain and found a way to get the job done. A few useful tips and tricks were jotted down for you to make your leveling experience more enjoyable. Tired of killing gnolls? Go for a swim in the river and laugh at murloc screams. Need to run from Loch Modan to the Wetlands? Run over to the dam and jump off to get there. Can't keep track of all those quests? Tips for that too! For your mental sanity, if nothing else, navigate yourself on over there, park your toon in the inn, and read up. You will thank yourself for doing it.

The DORK Club has it right: the Ding is the sound of progress. There is no finer sound on Earth than the chime, or vamp, or whoosh of leveling up. It's visceral, it's addictive, and now, it can be all yours in mp3 form! The Club has collected no less than 40 dings from various games including Tabula Rasa, Star Wars Galaxies, Final Fantasy XI, Everquest, and even Diablo 2 for completeness' sake.

Listening to all 40 one after another is an interesting experience. Some dings sound downright ominous, while others are veritably orchestral and epic. And sad as we are to admit this, just listening to them all makes us want to play them! At least one of these is going to be someone's new ringtone, guaranteed. See who stops you in public when your phone rings; it's like a geek mating call!

MMOFury has a short interview up with Elliot Coward of Corum Online, a free-to-play, microtransaction-funded MMO (from the same company that runs Flyff and a few more originally Korean games). Corum has a nice little twist though -- in this game, not only do players level up, but so do dungeons. During the week, dungeons that have more players going through them will "level up," and get harder monsters to join, and players can even take over dungeons and gain rewards for their control. The Wikipedia page on the game says that things inside are pretty much taken over by high powered groups and guilds, but considering the size of the game, there's still quite a few dungeons that are uncontrolled. Sounds interesting.

To that end, Coward says that the devs are currently working on beefing up the guild system, including building up some systems for guild vs. guild play, and they're always trying to push out more dungeons -- Coward says that "MMOG players can burn through content like a hot knife through butter." Sounds about right to us.

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.

Can you believe January is almost already over? Time flies, as they say, when you're playing MMOs. Wait-- that's what they say, isn't it?

This weekend, I'm going to be playing lots of Burnout Paradise, which actually has a lot of MMO qualities. The online gameplay is exquisite, and Criterion did a great job of tracking everything (and I mean everything) you do, and even then displaying that information to the people you're playing against. Before a race, it'll say things like "toucansamurai has 40 online takedowns," and the in-game narration will even taunt you to try and battle against certain players. Very awesome. It doesn't have a persistent world, per se (although many of the things you destroy do remain destroyed, I guess, even if other players don't see them that way), so it's not really an MMO in the strictest sense of the word. But for a racing game, it does a lot of online things just right.

And of course, like everyone else, I find myself drawn back yet again to World of Warcraft. My Night Elf Hunter isn't leveling itself, unfortunately. What aRe yoU Playing this weekend in the world of MMOs?

Previously on WRUP...