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MMO Casual
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·Joar
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Every other MMO I've written about this month is still out there, running in some form, waiting for me to drift back if I ever want to. WildStar isn't. WildStar is gone, actually gone, servers dark, world deleted, the whole thing switched off in 2018 like a light in an empty room. That's why this is the one that actually hurt. You can leave a game. It's a different thing entirely when the game leaves you, and there's no reinstall that brings it back.
Let me tell you what it got gloriously right,…
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Inventory Full
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·Bhagpuss
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Is it still Creator Appreciation Week? I think it might be. Or if it isn't, it was on Friday, which was when I started this post.
I'm going to throw a little appreciation at Neverness To Everness but not to the whole team, much though they deserve it. I think it's already apparent how much I appreciate their work from all the highly complimentary posts I've been writing about the game since it started.
No, I'm going to be a little more specific, although by no means as specific as I'd like to be…
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MMO Casual
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·Joar
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RIFT is the one that showed up in 2011 looking like it might actually do it, actually be the game that gave WoW a real run, and then slowly, quietly, didn't. It's the saddest kind of MMO story to me. Not the ones that launch broken and deserve to fade. The ones that launch genuinely good, make you believe for a while, and run out of road anyway.
Let me tell you how good the launch actually was, because people forget. RIFT came out polished. Not "polished for a small studio," just polished. It ra…
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MMO Casual
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·Joar
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I've written under this name for seventeen years, and people still ask me now and then why I don't just put my real name on it. The easy answer is that Joar is a pen name and the whole point of a pen name is privacy. The honest answer is more complicated than that, because if I'm being straight with you, the wall I supposedly built around this thing has more holes in it than I'd like to admit, and most of them I punched myself.
Start with where the name comes from, since that part's simple. Joar…
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The Ghastly Mirror
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On my last playthrough I visited Ironforge and hunted don a killer bear. With Dun Morough completed, its nowtime to move to the next zone.
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MMO Casual
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·Joar
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Shadowlands is the one that actually got me to quit, and after nineteen years of playing, that's not a sentence I write lightly. Warlords nearly lost me to boredom, a year of sitting in a garrison with nothing to do, but I white-knuckled through it and stayed subscribed. Shadowlands I didn't. Shadowlands frustrated me so thoroughly that I unsubscribed, walked away, and stayed gone for about a year. Boredom just means the game left. Frustration means the game is right there, asking for your time…
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MMO Casual
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·Joar
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Battle for Azeroth wore me out, and it did it with the one thing WoW is supposedly built on. Faction war. Alliance versus Horde, the oldest fight in the game, cranked up to be the entire point of an expansion. And instead of feeling like the payoff to two decades of buildup, it mostly made me tired. I main an undead warlock. I've been Horde since Burning Crusade. And BfA is the expansion that made me realize I didn't actually want to fight this war anymore.
It's also the expansion where my altoh…
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Nerdy Bookahs
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·paeroka
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I haven’t replied to a “Daily Grind” from Massively in ages, but this one immediately got me thinking and making a list: How many MMORPGs have you played to date?
I know there were a few more that I tried, but my memory is rather fuzzy about them. So, my list includes the games that I either played extensively or that I have fond memories of.
Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO)
Guild Wars (GW1)
Guild Wars 2 (GW2)
World of Warcraft (WoW)
Rift
Wildstar
Star Trek Online (STO)
The Elder Scrolls Online…
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The Ghastly Mirror
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When we last left off, I was doing some quest in a Troll cave and Tamed a Bear. As I progressed further my questing sent me to the mighty city of Ironfroge
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MMO Casual
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·Joar
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Today we're going to divert yet again from the regular discussion of World of Warcraft, just like I have over the years with this blog.
Guild Wars 2 is the MMO I respect more than almost any other, and the one I keep at arm's length even though I've quietly poured a serious number of hours into it. That's the contradiction I want to be honest about. "Keep at arms length" makes it sound like I've barely touched the thing. I haven't. I've got a max-level character of every class in that game, beca…
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MMO Casual
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·Joar
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Mists of Pandaria got laughed at before anyone had played a minute of it. Kung fu pandas. A whole expansion about kung fu pandas, plus a pet-battle system a lot of people immediately wrote off as WoW doing Pokémon. I remember the reaction to the announcement, and it was not kind. It also turned out to be one of my favorite expansions in the whole run, and I've never really backed off that.
The joke fell apart the second you actually got to Pandaria. The place was gorgeous. The Jade Forest, the V…
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MMO Casual
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·Joar
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After a pretty solid week of World of Warcraft discussions, I thought I'd take today to being to toss in some discussions on other games.
I gave Final Fantasy XIV a real shot. Not a weekend, not a free trial I abandoned in the starting city. A couple of years, an actual subscription, a character and jobs I put genuine hours into. And I still stopped. This is my attempt to be honest about why, without doing the tribal thing where you have to trash one game to justify playing another.
And of cours…
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Through Wolfy's Eyes
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·wolfyseyes
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It is far too easy in these modern times to ignore or even believe that good things are coming. And it’s also easy to dismiss excitement at upcoming games as dismissive of the wider global horrors; some temporary panacea that just delays the drop into the void.
I feel differently. I have always maintained that being excited for new things in gaming is a wonderful feeling, and one that I’m very often swept up in, particularly when it comes to MMOs. I also think that if all you look at are the bad…
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michcia's notes
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·michcia
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I picked up Final Fantasy XIV sometime mid-2022.1 I was finishing the final year of my Master degree, except I already knew I would be repeating it, because very little was done. I was in the middle of an internship that was remote and not really my cup of tea. In the middle of all this stress, my gender was having a stroke too. There was no better time for me to fall for a massive time-sink of an MMORPG with free trial up to level 60 including the award-winning Heavensward expansion, and so I d…
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MMO Casual
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·Joar
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Ask a hundred WoW players which expansion was the best and a good chunk of them, without hesitating, will say Wrath. I'm one of them. I've played every expansion since, and none of them ever quite got back to what Northrend felt like in 2009.
Part of it was the setup. TBC pulled me in, but Wrath was the first expansion I got to walk into on day one, already max level, already ready, no old-world slog standing between me and the new stuff. You picked a boat to Howling Fjord or a zeppelin to Borea…
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MMO Casual
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·Joar
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I didn't start with Vanilla. I know that's practically heresy in some circles, but it's the truth. The expansion that actually pulled me into World of Warcraft and never let go was The Burning Crusade.
Picture where I was. Everybody I knew was already max level, already geared, already talking about a game I'd never touched. So I rolled a character and started the long grind to 60, through the same Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor zones that hadn't really been touched in a while by everyone else. T…