There’s been a bit of a meme going around where people share the sixth screenshot from their sixth screenshot subdirectory. Unfortunately, I don’t order screenshots quite like that. Instead, I thought I’d just go through my big old FRAPs folder (which contains the last 5 months or so of screenies from me) and show you my personal favorites. Here you go (with a key after the cut):

I’m hopelessly out of date, but I’ve been doing my best to get caught up on the ’sphere and such. Here’s some stuff I think is worth following up on:

• LotRO Book 7 sounds a-maze-ing. The new player experience and the release notes are some of the finest work yet out of an amazing group of devs. Great work all around.
• Eurogamer’s “Ten Level Test” is some of the best MMO writing I think I’ve ever seen. No joke. Oli Welsh has a fantastic take on this. Check out the editorial laying the groundwork, then the first two rounds: EQ2 vs. Vanguard, Lineage 2 vs. FFXI.
• The new WoW TCG Loot cards continue to impress. I love how the ultra-rares continue to add alternate game mechanic elements.
• The end of Tabula Rasa in a nutshell. Same day as my first at SOE. Weird world.
• Lauren revisits ‘bring the player’ vs. ‘bring the class’ with a look at Runes of Magic.
• Scott Brown proves NetDevil has a good grasp on reality: “We built this so that no matter how big it is, it doesn’t have to be a million-user game for it to be successful for us to run it for a long, long time.”

Just in case you hadn’t already checked it out, episode 33 of the Van Hemlock podcast is entirely taken up by Jon and Tim listening to and talking about game music. It’s not *all* MMO-related, but it’s a bigtime fun time just the same.

This week we’ve got our first annual year end music show, where we let you listen to music from games that you do know and maybe some that you don’t.

This time the music comes from these games:

Warhammer Online / Guild Wars / Neocron 2 /Morrowind
Planescape Torment/ Mass Effect /Darwinia /Halo 3 /Overlord
Mirror’s Edge/ Portal/ Tron 2.0/ Bioshock/ Homeworld 1
Gears of War 1 & 2/ Summoner/ Evil Genius/ Crackdown/ Fallout 3
Tone Rebellion/ Lord of the Rings Online /Civilization 4

I really enjoyed the lookaheads that some of my fellow MMO blogfolk threw down in the last few weeks:

• Lum dropped his first, and I agree with a lot of what he has to say. I particularly like his personal viewpoint on the newly-independent developers and whta they’re likely to sink their teeth into.
• MMOment of Zen has some similarly well seen offerings. I think it’s interesting the different views of Aion everyone has.
• Hardcore Casual is a bit looser, I think, but he’s got a few good ones. I think his tone about RMT isn’t very useful, that said. Cracks like “one major MMO will make a legitimate push into full-on RMT, giving us the NGE of 2009″ make me grumpy.
• Brent makes a lot of really awesome callouts in his lengthy list of upcoming events. In fact, I’ll be honest: I feel like a big tool because he was willing to say a lot of the stuff I wasn’t willing to. Good on ya, mate. I think he goes a little far on some of those bullet points, but for the most part that’s some awesome work.

Thank you, guys. Seriously nice bloggage this week/weekend.

• Lum’s review and anti-review of Warhammer Online is must-do reading for folks interested/playing the game. He’s a seriously smart fella with a great tack on the title.
• Meanwhile Lume the Mad is also writing, doing a great recap of BlizzCon. The value here is in the commentary more than the infoz. For that, check out WoW Insider’s exhaustive workups.
• Tobold continues to be highly lucid, noting that Blizzard’s addition of microtransactional character customizations is a.) nothing to get worked up about and b.) kinda cool actually. I’m actually really looking forward to this; the Undead tend to look a bit samey.

Oh, and also? New Snacky’s Journal! hahahahahah

Wow, what happened to snarkily ranting Tobold? I really like this measured, thoughtful Tobold!

Syp is right in saying that the problem of gold selling is the demand of gold buyers. But his solution is wrong, because he short-sightedly attributes the demand to notions of “morality or honor”, which is just plain silly. Player’s demand for gold is simply a function of how grindy it is to get gold, and what you need that gold for. And that are all questions of game design. It is a lot easier to solve the problem with good game design than to start a successful crusade to stop people from cheating in video games. Google has 80 million hits in a search for “cheats”, most of which are about video games, that isn’t something we can make go away if we all just hold hands and wish for it very, very strongly.

Okay, if he was snarking about me I might be a bit more testy. He’s 100% right through that whole post, though, and about the only thing I can add is that I can’t believe people are still high and mighty about secondary in-game currencies in 2008. I mean theres, what, a kabillion dollar aftermarket for that gold piece you earned from your Dailies in WoW, right?

The truth, though, is that people wanking about the dishonor of goldbuyers and the scourge of goldsellers should really put it back in their pants. For better or worse goldselling is something that’s … well, I’ll say it outright: in my mind it’s not an issue that players have to worry about anymore. Every game I can think of has done their best to deal with goldfarming and spammers at this point. Every one.  It’s 2008, and if you are still getting spammed by goldfarmers in-game it’s becuase the game developers want you to be. It’s as simple as that.

To clarify: I am being mostly flippant with that statement; obviously the developers don’t *want* you to be spammed. Ultimately my belief is that goldfarming hurts game developers in actuality, whereas goldfarmers are really only a perceptive annoyance/negative impact on players. Scott has a fantastic, AAA-level writeup on his solution to this issue at Broken Toys. Go read.

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In honor of the tenth MMOG Nation Broadcast featuring Paul Barnett, I thought it would be worthwhile to link back to my first discussion with Mr. Barnett. In one of my first ‘Face the Nation’ interviews last year, Paul and I chat very obliquely about Warhammer but – moreover – talk about almost everything else.

Part One focuses on Paul’s background and the inspiration for making games:

MN: The next more serious question I have is, moving the game back out until next year: that seems like an obvious, intelligent thing to do. But, can you give us some insight into what the decision-making process was there?

Paul: Yes, it’s about FARTs.

In Part Two the bulk of our time is spent talking about the role of designers in the games industry, and the wankery of both:

Paul: Let’s stop talking about C++, let’s stop talking about our new clever way of doing a design, and let’s start talking about the fact that we earn quite a lot of money, that we pay the bills, that we’re interesting people, that we’ve got a career, that you can do it, that we can all do it. And if we all work together, we can have a bloody good laugh. And! Mom will be impressed.

Part Three caps off with some discussion of class balance:

Paul: Ninety percent of the people playing Class A have no idea that they were unbalanced. They had no idea that they were cheating. They had no idea that they were having an easy run of it. All of a sudden they log in and find that their character’s crap. Their character is crap, and yet they did nothing to justify that. They were just paying you money, and playing the game. But because some la-di-da clever designer went and read the message boards, and found out that four people playing Class A were able to kill the dragon “Sparklers” while walking backwards waving fish, these people suddenly have their characters crippled.

To listen to the whole thing as audio, check out the (somewhat poor-quality) recording.