– Left to right, top to bottom -

1.) BioShock. A momentous moment in the game, that thankfully I could take a snap of without spoiling anything. I took a snap right after this that was a spoiler, of course.

2.) This is the strange non-crazy illithid in one of the House areas. I think his name is ‘Bob’ or something.

3.) The special ’social’ area behind the scenes in EverQuest II has a piano with its own built-in dancers.They’re wacky haflings named after some of the community folks, lest I’m mistaken.

4.) I dunno why I took this screencap; I just really liked the way this lizard was dressed.

5.) From one of the test houses, this great tent and a pair of animated-pet decorated bed was quite a treat. Along the walls were pretty much every one of the heritage quest weapons. Awesome, amazing example of EQ2’s housing.

6.) I really really have wanted to like the offerings in the EQ2 marketplace, and until this awesome spellcasting outfit dropped in I hadn’t. Want. Want want want. Not want at $10. But want.

7.) Err. Sometimes when I’m watching stuff on iTunes I catch snapshots because my cap button is a weird one. What can I say, I actually like Clone Wars.

8.) One of the early moments in the dwarf starting quest in LotRO. Gandalf kicks a cave troll to the curb, and looks really hawt doing it.

9.) The amazing-fantastico Podcasters of Bree! L to R, Back to front. Brent, Darren, Jonathan, Adam, Michael, Craig.

10.) This is what it looks like to podcast with the guys from the Gamers with Jobs crew. This is another of those accidental screencaps that turned out so nicely I kept it.

11.) This is me as Amak sitting in the Theed square during the SWG Fifth Anniversary celebration.

12.) I think this is from the second hub in the High Elf area in Warhammer Online. I love the ‘destroyed beauty’ look that WAR goes with in a lot of places. Very effective.

13.) And yet, the regalness of the intact bits are pretty awesome too. This is from the Imperial City, near the library.

14.) I love this graphical bug. Huge pets are just so awesome. This Rex is enormous compared to the little peeps.

15.) I love the theme in the Nethers. Amazing, amazing zone. I don’t understand why most folks don’t like this one.

16.) The, um, Dark Lady’s new skin. A lot to like, and not just for the obvious reasons. Check out that bow!

17.) I actually really like the WoW comic. It’s popcorn fun, and awesome to see events from the comic show up in game.

18.) A quick cap from the world event that presaged Wrath of the Lich King’s release.

19.) My favorite place in the whole wide game! Gjalerbron all the way. Howling Fjord or bust.

20.) Speaking of which, this central area is majestically amazing no matter where you’re standing.

21.) I … just like penguins. Especially these penguin models. Squak!

• 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.”

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

• 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.

• 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

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.

Let’s go down the list of some farming/spammer solutions:

• EverQuest 2: Solved issue. Players who want to buy currency have the official aftermarket to use. I know for a fact, having talke to some of them, that some EQ2 players that were buying gold on the secondary market are now happily on the two RMT servers run by LiveGamer. They like the fact that they don’t have to worry about scams, and that there’s no stigma attached to their purchases. Goldfarming is still big on the other servers, but it’s REALLY hard for spammers to do any advertising because of SOE’s robust filter/blocking system. Result: plat is more expensive.
• World of Warcraft: Solved issue. Spam-blocking to the max, and … wait for it … gold is really INEXPENSIVE on the open market. Daily quests out the yin-yang was basically Blizzard’s solution to goldfarmers, with the idea that it should be easier to just farm the money yourself than rely on an unreliable farmer and a system of possibly felonious fellows. Right now 1000 gold is selling for less than $20. The price was probably … I’d guess about three times that a year ago?
• Final Fantasy XI: Solved issue. There’s an entire taskforce dedicated to stamping out these ruffians, and the in-game gambling scam factories are pretty well done and over with. Obviously there are always folks skimming the edges, but the pernicious existance of these characters is well and truly under control.

The real problem with goldsellers, in this day and age, isn’t their impact on the players. Game developers pretty well have that element under control, I think.

The real problem is their impact on the companies, with chargebacks to stolen credit cards and endless account forgery. That’s the real problem. If you’re going to get on your huffy bike and be upset about something, that’s the thing to be upset about. Chargebacks and bank fraud are already a major concern to MMO developers, and at this point if you’re launching a game without some serious consideration of those issues, you’re just being naive.

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.