Mage Tanking... really?

I just saw several posts by [mage] people who would love to have a mage tank spec.

My problems with it are:
* I doubt people will still want to tank even with a spec
* The spec doesn't fit with the classical idea of the mage [ie dps]
* Tank specs should then have a dps spec just as good as mages

Ultimately, this moves the game design to a FPS like Quake or Unreal. In fact, just remove tanking all together and make everything a frag fest.

SW TOR

Let me just say that I enjoyed SW//KOTOR and to a lesser extend SW//KOTOR2 because the story in the first one was awesome -- that said, I think SW//TOR's binding the storyline to a MMO style game is unusual and belongs in single player play.  The rest of it will be a sad wow clone so I shall pass on playing it, until they make it F2P and I can run around on a lowbie level 20.

Should MMO Starting Areas Be Instanced?

A better idea to me would be have a lot of AOE quests, much like the "Putting out the fires" during Hallow's End in wow, where people are required to work together to put out a fire with buckets.  This converts quests from linear/solo achievements to temporal/group achievements.  Sure, they can still be accomplished either solo or group, but you are moving 100% of activity in 1 day to 100% activity in x days, where x days is the regular login/logout activity of players.


http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com/2011/08/instanced-starting-content.html

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2011/08/crowd-control.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ToboldsBlog+%28Tobold%27s+MMORPG+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Actually

Now that I think about it, it should progress from 40-man down to 5-mans... lulz!

New Blizzard Mechanic

All raids will now be progression/attunement chains.

* Players are intended to clear normal dungeons to access heroic dungeons
* Players are intended to clear heroic dungeons to access raids
* Players are intended to clear normal raids to unlock heroic raids
* Players are intended to unlock heroic raids to unlock 25-man normal raids
* Players are intended to unlock 25-man normal raids to unlock 25-man heroic raids
* Players are intended to unlock 25-man heroic raids to unlock 40-man raid
* 40-man raids will unlock legendary shiznit

Or something like that.

Alas my heirlooms

Farewell, farewell...

Had a realization yesterday that I had no clue where my dual discerning eyes of the beast are.  I had transferred them over to Shandris a year ago, and keep purging those newbies (under level 10).  Somewhere in the shuffle, 150 champion seal's worth of gold trinkets went poof.  They are not coming back. They are not passing go.  They are not even in jail.  You will be missed, little guys.  Even if I don't have it in me to level another caster.

Theoretical Question

If an MMO loses 20% or 30% of its peak subscriber base, should it:

(a)  start rolling out massive and exciting changes to lure its base back (like new content)

(b)  start catering to the remaining players (like adding little features the holdovers want, like ten Death Knights per server)

(c)  answer to no one and let the chief devs mangle the game mechanics however they see fit (making paladins use HP)

D3 Auction House

It looks like D3 will have a real money auction house, aimed for people with no time but money to buy things from other people for money.

Pros:
* Provides a legalized system of trade (instead of gold sellers)
* Win for people with no time (who can obtain epic gear, etc)
* Win for people with too much time (who can sell epic gear, etc)

Cons:
* People feel the value of "effort required to get epics" is lost
* Some people cannot participate

Since I mostly won't be playing D3, these points are lost on me.  However, I can see this model coming to Titan.  If that is so, I don't intend to buy epics from the AH... BUT... who knows.  In some cases, it may be more effective for me to pay a few bucks for 100 epic gems instead of farming them.  We shall see.