The cottage rule sucks

For far too many years, the world of City of Heroes has been plagued by a rule called the cottage rule. A player once asked for a particular superpower to be rethought, and a developer — Castle, actually — responded by saying that changing that power into something else would be unfair to the players. After all, players had chosen…

With songs they have sung

My takeaway from Mad Men Season 4 came in the form of a revelation about the gender norms of today, not of the bygone days in which the series is set: A lot of men really still are pigs. I don’t like the realization. My generation grew up pretending sexism didn’t exist, and for many of us, that made it…

Moonlighting on Massively Speaking

My boss invited me to guest-host on this week’s Massively Speaking podcast, on which you can hear the decidedly midwestern accents of Shawn Schuster, Rubi Bayer and me as we discuss EVE Online’s upcoming expansions, the Minecraft craze, sparkly vampires or lack thereof in World of Darkness, hack-and-slash freemium game Vindictus, MMO crafting pitfalls, the state of the MMO industry,…

Caveat emptor is lazy game design

EVE Online is one of those sandboxes I wish I could love. It’s in space. It’s pretty. It’s got partly open PvP. It has neat races and backstory. It has crafting. It has harvesting. It has an awesome trading system, and distance matters. You can make money from players just by moving products across the galaxy. In short, it theoretically…

SHSO: The reinvention of toys

Since I started working for Massively, the one upcoming game I’ve gotten to check out in person more than any other is a cute little game from Gazillion and the Amazing Society called Super Hero Squad Online under this quaint, obscure IP called “Marvel comics.” Gazillion’s devs have actually secured the rights to Marvel games for something like the next…

Why otherwise-normal people start blogs

Over the last few months of working at Massively, I have found myself repeatedly telling writers that they needed to focus less on social media and more on content — that they needed blogs, good blogs, blogs with stuff people actually want to read (or at least stuff people want to say they want to read). Maybe even blogs written…