Have I ever mentioned how much I like MTV’s games coverage? Stephen Totilo is doing a bangup job over there. Now if only it weren’t trapped in that awful flash thing.

Anyway, Totilo has a sit-down with Jeff Kaplan up on the site right now, and it’s good stuff. The part that made me jump up and down in my seat is, specifically, this:

“Another small but potentially profound concept for ‘WoW’ is player-generated housing. Gamers don’t have a room of their own for their characters to live and decorate right now. This matters to Kaplan, who is a big fan of ‘Animal Crossing,’ the Nintendo franchise centered around cultivating a home and sense of unique, personal space. ‘I think housing can take World of Warcraft to the next level,’ Kaplan said. ‘I want to make sure that when we introduce player housing to World of Warcraft we do it right and give the feature the credit that it deserves, which is a massive amount of production time on the programming, design and art time. It’s something we actually wanted to do for the original shipping game.’ But it’s not coming, he said, until it’s a “Blizzard-quality feature.”

You’ll note he doesn’t say ‘if’, but ‘when we introduce player housing’. I was starting to worry. Thanks Blizz! You have made one guy, at least, really happy with this announcement.

There was a server reset a while ago, and so I didn’t get a chance to get a screenshot of it (ala Foton). Wish I had, because I think I saw the re-discovery of one of my favorite terms: The Faqro.

FAQro /fæk, ˈɛfˈeɪˈkyu/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[fak-row] - noun. Chiefly MMOG-nerds. A pre-made statement, bound to a key (see macro) which introduces newcomers to a topic, as in Hellfire chat.

I heard this term thrown around a lot during the CoH Beta days, and during the early days of Guild Wars: Factions. Good terms just can’t be thrown away. :)

Seriously, and for truly, I don’t mind that the only prognostigatory statement I thought for sure would be true has turned out … not so much. From everything I’ve seen, the launch of Burning Crusade has gone very, very smoothly. There were queues at peak time, yeah, but despite the snarking I think everyone appreciated the heads up beforehand. Once you were in, the servers I was on were absolutely 100% playable from start to finish.

I actually had the chance to test all up and down the Blizzard infrastructure on Tuesday. Over the course of the day I re-upped my account, used the paid character transfer, and upgrade my regular account to BC. At no point was there a slowdown, and despite dire warnings that my character transfer could take ‘up to three days’, I was up on my new Realm and playing within a few hours of punching in my CC number.

Serious, major applause for Blizzard for this. Obviously, Friday is going to be the next test. When everyone gets off of work on Friday and tries to get their character up over 62 in one night it’s going to make that new hardware sweat like a disco-dancing sumo wrestler.

My quick impressions from about 10 hours of play on Tuesday -

High End: I never thought I’d like playing my Paladin again. Maybe it’s the new name (a very Germanic sounding Groedin), maybe it’s the new sparklies that accompany my seals and judgements, maybe it’s the chance to be a (sorta) badass retribution Pally again. For whatever reason, working my way through Hellfire and Zangermarsh have been like a little slice of heaven. I move my Pally from the (oh god what was I thinking) RP server to a PVE server where my Slashdot co-workers are now playing. It’s quite inspiring to have people to play with, who I actually know, again. I’m still going to be the last, or one of the last, to reach 70. That race isn’t even one I’m trying on. But … I’m actually looking forward to running. That hasn’t happened in a long time.

Dranei: The only thing that might get in the way of my making 70 within the next few months is the incredibly engaging Dranei Priestess I rolled up. I knew I was going to like the Dranei; hulking males, cute chicks, cloven feet, Russian accents. What’s not to like? I didn’t realize how much, though until I started playing her. The architecture, the quests, the racial animations … I like Dwarves and all, but this is now the race I wish I’d been able to play when the game launched. Blizz has knocked one out of the park with these folks, and it really really shows.

Blood Elves: Maybe I’m just not a Hordie, but the Blood Elves grabbed me a lot less strongly than I thought they would. The BE guy I conjured up was too haughty, the architecture too imposing. I’ve never really been an elfy-welfy sort, so I think there’s a lot of that there, too. I really think Blizz has nailed these guys too, and I imagine there will be a lot of Horders tired of having horns or rotting flesh that will flock to the attractive elves. Here’s hoping that a non-elven race is still the predominant one in a year’s time amongst the hordies. I know I, for one, will be ready to wipe the smirk off the face of every Blood Elf I see.

Not okay. Not even a little bit okay. A French guild basically power-leveled a mage to 70 just so they could. Sick, sick, sick.

In an interview with World of Raids.com, Gullerbone, who reached level 70 with a mage class character called Gawell, told how he had help from 40 in-game friends working with him around the clock. He said: “Cau (the 1st European lvl 60) and I planned the exp(erience) route step by step, trying everything to make sure it was the most appropriate, the groups organization with the guild Millenium and their members. Each member rotated using a definite order to help me to grind on mobs, mostly with AE, surrounded with several guildmate healers, tanks, pullers etc…”

It went past on The Forge’s blog early this month with little commentary outside the post, but it made my eyebrows go up. Iron Realms sprang for two fulltime positions for their flagship MMOG Achaea. These aren’t developers or designers - they’re “Assistant Producers for Roleplay“.

As Assistant Producer for Roleplay, you will help to ensure the continuous flow and evolution of the roleplay and storylines within the world of Achaea, in order to promote overall game dynamism and the immersive appeal of a changing environment open to influence via interaction. Responsibilities include, but are not limited to: working with other staff and volunteers to prepare and carry out roleplay story scenarios; extemporaneous roleplayed interaction with the playerbase; assisting in the continuous development of a cohesive world background, history, and mythos; and content creation, such as writing scripts, summaries, or promotional material for roleplay events.

The hires were made from two of the ‘Gods’ they had already working on the game. They’re now working as RP facilitators. These are two positions added to a small game run by an indie developer. The idea, in and of itself, sounds awesome. Why don’t we see stuff like this in bigger games that can more obviously afford such extravagances?

The answer, of course, is right there in the comments. Cael wrote:

Thumbs up to The Forge and  Achaea for their new deal. I hope it works out well for you.

The site outage has made this a bit tardy, but my band of adventuring kin did get the chance to check out the extremely awesome FrostFell event Sony has laid out in EverQuest II. I’m not going to go into an in-depth description here, as Van Hemlock has done a good job with that, but I did want to comment on it just the same.

The spread put out for the Holiday season by Blizzard is reliable, but after three years of the same thing I think most players are mostly done with the adventures of the reindeer Metzen. The EverQuest II event, though, is different every year.

This year was notable for me as, thanks to my recent Norrathian traveling companions, I had a really good reason for checking it out. My wife, who is (I love you sweetheart) a giant book nerd and academic, really dug the pseudo-literary theme for the instanced quest. I’m a clothes-horse in massive games, and ended up falling head over heels in love with my pimped out Christmas attire: blue santa hat, blue winter cape, and pepper-mint wafting candycane cane. Nice looking stuff.

Katie has also really been getting into crafting of late, and the emphasis placed on that part of the game made the holiday activities that much more enjoyable. By endlessly gathering from presents in the Frostfell village, players could craft unique holiday items like outfits, furniture, and other such niceties. I picked up one of the books of holiday furniture, but I’ll be damned if I ever got something made.

The problem was (and this is my only real complaint with the way things were set up), all ‘classes’ of crafting items were contained within those packages. Cooking items were side by side with woodworking, cloth-sewing, and other bits. It was thus very hard to get a specific item made: by the time you’d found what you were looking for the inside of your bags resembled the floor in a Santa-themed strip club. Duck heads, tinsel, toy parts strewn everywhere.

For next year, assuming they do something similar, I’d love to see crafting-specific nodes. The game as a whole does this (offering wood from fallen trees), and I can’t see that it would be too hard to do the same for the seasonal offering. Rivers of molten chocolate could offer up cooking resources, while rocking horses and toy soliders could be broken up for woodworking resources.

All three of us had a blast getting our holiday on. Assuming we’re still playing EQ2 as 2007 ends, I’m resolved to get even more out of it than I did in 2006.