When MMOGs Ruled The Quickies 40
This summer it seems like Massive games are the only good news going, and this week has been busy. R. Spencer writes "1UP explores MMO addiction and, in true confessional style, opens the floor to heavy users and recovered junkies. It's especially interesting how much the mechanisms of MMO addiction have in common with other forms of addiction. The primary source of addiction nowadays seems to be World of Warcraft. If you're jonesing right now, you might want to check out this Guide to the Creation of the Scarlet Monastery on the official site. Additionally, Mogg writes "For new players, GamerGod has a up part one of a guide to the game World of Warcraft." This is Tobold's first writerly foray at the new site. Luck to him. For something a little different, 1up explores the world of Sociolotron...a Sex MMOG. Speaking of sex, SOE has been busy lately. The end to the Quest for Antonia search is almost here. They've put up new details on future EQ2 content, and announced a dramatic downsizing of The Matrix Online. See, when no one plays, you don't need as many servers. The new content mob is rearing his head all over with Secrets of the Syren in the works on Star Wars Galaxies, CoH Issue 5 coming up soon, and screenshots from the next Guild Wars update available. MMORPG.com continues to put out interesting editorials, with a look at the stories in Massive Games. Finally, the highly respectable Nick Yee has published a new edition of The Daedalus Project. The seminal source of MMOG statistics on the web has articles on participation in games at the level cap, introductions to the genre, and the stress of loot. As always, participation in the survey helps ensure future issues have good data.
And WoW still hasn't fixed the classes... (Score:1, Informative)
However, they still haven't addressed Shamans totally overpowering every single Alliance class. They buffed some of the Horde racials too, making the Horde even more powerful against the Alliance. Plus, Battlegrounds itself is also biased in favor of the Horde!
There is still some progress, warlocks finally got their "love" and were fixed in 1.6 (although there are still some bugs, a bunch were hotfixed, but summoning other players is still broken in some instances). Hunters and Druids should be getting some fixes in 1.7, but with all the ways they've broken Hunters in the last eight months, Hunters are going to need way more than one patch to be fixed.
Paladins, the Alliance-only class, are of course still as broken as ever, while the Horde-only class of Shamans got some buffs in the last patch (although unintentional, but they haven't been fixed yet...).
Hopefully Blizzard will stop releasing new raid content and concentrate on releasing patches that fix the issues with the game and get the Alliance up to par with the Horde. The amount of Horde-bias in recent content is staggering.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
They don't have anything like that on in the real world man. They all wear rags and other garbs that you would expect people who live in a hole in the ground. The clothes in the Matrix are all contrivances.