Big stuff today on Massively from me. My fingers hurt.

• Not technically from today, but instead earlier this week, a fun retrospective on the two most recent Guild Wars boxes.
• Catching up with Warhammer. I sat in on another one of those EA Mythic conference calls, which you may recall from here on the site. Made me a little sad not to be putting it up here. Times they are a changin’, huh?
• Lots of AoC stuff on the site today, as the NDA dropped for press folks. I put in a sort of thousand-foot view on the game, and a heaping pile of videos and screenshots.
• It’s also a Thursday, so Massively Speaking #3 went up. Yay for consistency! #5 or bust!

I finished up a huge project over the weekend, and have been working on another one of moderate size since last Friday for tomorrow … so I’ve been a bit off.

I wanted to take a sec to throw back some links, though, because I’ve gotten a lot of love recently. Actually (and don’t ask me why) the posts from last week got a really warm reception from folks - I even got email about them. I never get email about MN.

• I’ve gotten LOTS of feedback on my Bullet Point List, which I am not too surprised about. I jotted it off in a hurry, probably should have thought more about it. Still: fun to write. The -gards of 38 Studios commented on the post (thanks, guys!), and Grimwell even offered up a way to make my dreams of shard-free gaming a reality.
• My back-of-the-napkin poking at numbers got a lot of good-hearted flack (though nothing like poor Cameron got back in the day). My favorite comment about this post wasn’t even here on the site; Angus made it the topic of an entire post. I didn’t even know Angus knew about MN. (Heya Angus!) It’s really hard to dislike someone disagreeing with you when they do it so *well*.
• My post a while back about Microsoft and Sony’s duel over console MMOs has reappeared on CMP’s network, polished up a bit and wearing a bowtie. Make sure to read the comments; Sony hate knows no professional boundaries.
• Stephen was nice enough to mention me on the MTV Multiplayer blog after he, myself, and Chris Grant had a spot of the GTA IV multiplayer. Y’know, I think you should ignore what everyone else is saying … it’s actually a pretty good game.

Thanks for reading, folks.

My general rule of thumb is that when I see something I want to comment on negatively out in the blogosphere, I tell my wife (she rolls her eyes) and I feel better. I’m an opinionated jerk but I’ve managed to keep some of my particularly assy tip-of-the-tongue snark to myself. But … I’m sorry, I just gotta vent a bit. On Thursday Tobold made me want to rip my eyes out of my head. He starts with a provacative statement, offering a possible future where Blizzard offers microtransactional autoleveling for World of Warcraft. It’s a joke, of course, but he follows that with:

“You were probably disgusted by the thought that somebody could pay dollars to reach a certain level or get a set of epic gear without playing the game. But the sad truth is that some people do exactly that. There are powerleveling services, honor point grinding services, arena point services, and anything else you can think of. If you wanted, you could create a fresh account, make a level 1 character on it, then give the userID and password plus a bundle of dollars to a powerleveling company, and receive the account back some weeks later with your character now level 70, having an epic flying mount, two tradeskills at 375, and a complete set of PvP epics.”

I know he’s making a point here, and my eye-ripping isn’t directed at Tobold per se. That said … the level of bigotry, snark, and close-minded aggression people have towards the idea of microtransactions and alternative business models is staggering. While I’m not sure I buy Cameron’s ‘rent a friend’ idea, it’s a pretty compelling argument. Even on top of that why would it be a bad thing, exactly, for Blizzard to offer up special servers that had a buy-your-own-70 service? They’re already offering characters on the Arena servers for a low, low cost; that gives you one specific slice of the WoW experience, at high level, on a microtransactional level. What would be wrong, exactly, with extending that to the raiding experience?

A green-decked 70 would get a ton out of mechanical utility out of high-end raiding, on top of the personal satisfaction from taking on that content. All Blizzard would be offering would be another way to experience a slice of Azeroth. The best thing to do would be to keep those characters locked at 70, too, and offer a bump to 80 (for a fee) some predetermined time after Lich King content is generally conquered.

I think they’d make a bundle on this service, and if the price was right I’d probably even partake. This would be the perfect way to get a static instance group going; everybody chips in to kit out a group, you grab your gear and go. Meet once a week to take on a new instance, and enjoy all the fun of that content without the months of grind to get there.

I really hope they offer this someday. It’s obvious that Blizzard is intent on the max-level experience being ‘the game’, and every barrier between players and that goal seems to be made to be broken. They’ve already reduced the time investment required … now all that remains is to demolish that fence completely.

Yeah, yeah, lore is fluff. But a lot of people (myself included, actually) find WoW’s backstory kind of interesting.  I certainly agree with David’ assessment over at Timesink - WoW has more compelling lore than EQ2 as an example.

I am fully aware that a lot of this is completely subjective, and people’s opinions will vary. I love EverQuest II, it’s a great game, but when compared to WoW, EQII does not feel like a “world” as oppsed to a bunch of loosely connected zones. I’m not criticizing EQII’s use of zoning, that never really bothered me, rather, EQII’s zones feel like zones. They feel like arbitrary areas created to adventure in with no connection or relation to any other parts, nor do they evoke any sense of historical importance.

I try to unravel the complicated threads of the Alliance racial backstories in my weekly WoW Exposed column for GameSetWatch.

While sci-fi’s played-out tropes have been rehashed and thinned down somewhat in recent years, we haven’t had a truly great genre shake-up for fantasy fans. The result is that even World of Warcraft, as successful and entertaining as it is, bogs down with an endless amount of backstory and genre cliches. Despite that, the lore of Warcraft is interesting stuff. There are a lot of compelling elements, individual tales that you can follow along through the thousands of years of sketched out storyline.

If you ignore the clap-trap about who specifically did what when or the endless back-and-forth between all-powerful entities, there are interesting characters and situations to focus on. Consider this the first in an ongoing series of articles looking at the backstory of Warcraft, with an eye towards making the material as approachable as possible.

If you’re reading me, I’m hopeful that you’re familiar with the fantastic work of Cameron Sorden. His Random Battle blog is a constant source of thought-provoking commentary on Massive games. I don’t always agree with what he has to say, but Cameron always has a really great point to get across.

Given how much I appreciate his writing, I’m positively ecstatic to relate that he’s writing at a new website. Where, you ask? How about Massively?

Cameron’s first blog post went up today, touching on the tutorial experience in the MMO genre.

There’s no game tutorial that comes in, holds your hand, and says, “Hey, pal. You’re going to need to use frost trap effectively in the end game. Let’s practice it a little until you get the hang of it.” Most MMOGs just teach you the bare-bones basics of the game (like running, moving, and auto-attack) before they abandon you to the wild. You’re expected to figure out the rest on your own, and eventually to hit up sites like Elitist Jerks or the World of Warcraft class forums to make sure that you’re being all that you can be. Is this necessarily the best way to do things, though?

If you like Cam’s MMO commentary, make sure to subscribe to Massively. Cameron’s almost-daily posts on the topic are now going to be hosted at the site, providing even more awesomesauce to the kettle of cool we’re stewing over there.

I hope you’ll join me in raising a glass for Games for Windows magazine, and the hearty pirate band over there. Jeff Green announced in a blog post today that the print version of the venerable publication is going to be discontinued.

Well, goddamn. Here’s a post I hoped I’d never have to write. As you no doubt know by now, we’re closing Games for Windows magazine. We will get to the “positive” to be gleaned from all this in a moment. Because there actually is some to be had, and it’s not even just “spin.” But, that said, you will all have to forgive me if I first take a moment to express what I know many of you are feeling right now: This blows. This is tough. This is just not in any way “good news.” For me personally, the closing of Games for Windows: The Official Magazine is not just a business decision (though, obviously it?s exactly that in reality), but feels more akin, in fact, to the passing of a loved one. Drama much? Well, you can scoff if you want, but the fact of the matter is that I have poured my heart and soul into this magazine, month after month after month, for over 10 years now.

They’re moving to an online-only format, so the editors should be keeping their gigs.

Many thanks to Jeff, Sean Molloy, Shawn Elliott, Ryan Scott, and all the rest of the folks behind them for a quality magazine. End of an era, indeed.

Many congratulations to Regina ‘Brinstar’ Buenaobra on her new gig as Arena.net’s new CM! My two cents? Don’t write about work on your for-fun blog. It gets messy.

But please still write! Acid for Blood is too awesome to stay dead! (The name alone …)