I remember the early promise of MMOs. Looking back it feels like I was almost miss-sold them. “Become a Hero” they’d loudly proclaim, as if you were the only one who could rid the world of the evil dragon and save the kingdom. Fast forward ten years and I’ve slain countless dragons, liches, evil kings…
Author: Gazimoff
Playing DPS: From Good to Great
It’s been a while since I wrote about actually playing MMOs, rather than just hypothesising about trends, changes and so on. It’s about time I talked about my favourite pastime. You might think that as long as you’re top of the damage charts that you can rest easy. You’re pouring out the pain in your…
Trading in Titan
News recently emerged that Diablo 3 will feature several in-game auction houses. One of these will use in-game gold to buy goods, while the other will use real cash. Putting the argument aside about this being a good or bad idea, I wanted to take a look at what this means for Titan, Blizzard’s next…
If Not You, Who Else?
I’m beginning to feel like there’s a crunch brewing. It’s almost like the shocks that happen before the earthquake, where you know something is going to happen but you can’t quite put your finger on what. It started off with the comments I’d spot on Twitter from players saying they were hanging up their Warcraft…
Rebuilding My Blogroll
If you saw the splash page earlier or read one of the various tweets on Twitter, today there’s been a bit of a change going on at Mana Obscura. I’ve decided that it was high time to move from shared hosting to a virtual private server and save a wedge of cash every month in…
Review: PingCraft LagKiller (Part 1)
Warcraft can be a challenging game at the best of times. Whether it’s fighting raid bosses, battling it out in arenas or just trying to cram daily quests into our hectic schedule we all want to be playing at our best. There’s various things as gamers that we can do to improve our game time….
A House of Cards
If you’ve played World of Warcraft for any reasonable length of time you’ll have seen people riding around on giant chickens or single seater rockets. You may even have seen someone mounted on a translucent tiger, proudly showing off in the middle of Stormwind or Orgrimaar. Ask where any of these come from and the…
Tired of MMOs?
There’s been a discussion kicking around Twitter for the past week or so, which seemed to end up with a single question. I think it was probably best said by Wolfshead: “is there anything left to say about today’s MMOs that hasn’t already been said?” If we’re talking about the current crop of MMORPG games…
Managing Guild Change
“All the world’s a game, And all the men and women merely gamers” With apologies to William Shakespeare This is a tough subject for me and one that comes from recent experience. You see, it’s about how guilds change and how that change is managed by guild leadership. Some change is inevitable, such as when…
The Infinite Trial
I find it funny how the word “trial” can be taken in two ways. There’s the positive side – being able to sample something or try it out before you commit to it. After all, we all want something for free and being able to try a bit of it for free sounds almost as…