Welcome to the 932nd Edition of Loading...
If you aren't reading this in your e-mail, you could be. Sign up. Are you looking for gaming news? Look no further for all of the headlines. General industry news, right down to game specific and forum thread feeds are all yours as part of Ten Ton Hammer's RSS Feed . Enjoy!
Daily Column
Loading... where every day brings a town hall debate.
First, the Ten Ton Pulse, your finger on the beating heart of the MMOG industry. All's fairly quiet on the top 10 front, yet EVE Online and Tabula Rasa continue to fight it out for the number 5 spot. With nearly five years under its belt, EVE Online is the grayhair on the list. Would you like to see Ten Ton Hammer do more EVE articles and guides? Let us know!
If the Top 10 isn't enough, we also show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)
- World of Warcraft
- Warhammer Online
- Age of Conan
- Lord of the Rings Online
- EVE Online
- Tabula Rasa
- Atlantica Online
- Stargate Worlds
- EverQuest II
- Dungeon Runners
Today marks day one of our BlizzCon journey, so my apologies for the short Loading... today. Yours truly is flying in to participate in a brief community summit a day before the real action begins on Friday. While I don't imagine we'll get any real one on one time with the devs until the weekend, I'd be glad to make your concerns and questions available to the Blizzard's community managers. Just post them in the Loading... forums so I can keep things straight.
Whether you love it or hate it , you have to admit that WoW is a curious beast. In college I studied poetry until I realized that making English Lit pay would mean years in grad school (at which point I switched majors to philosophy... /cough). So hopefully you won't mind if I let my true geek show for a little SAT-style analogy.
To me, WoW is to gaming as what Emily Dickinson or e.e. cummings were to poetry. It's pleasing and accessible, gratifying both on the surface and as you peel back the layers of its complexity. And any real fan of the medium is acquainted enough with its distinctions, so much so that if you attempt to copy the style, you'll be immediately exposed as a fraud. cummings' experiments with alternative typeset and expression were inevitable yet immensely creative in its simplicity, but having popularized his style, you won't be able to publish your not-so-clever little poem about a frog with the letters F-R-O-G jumping across the page.
Thankfully, even with all the foolhardy venture capital running through the industry prior to last week, we haven't seen many real attempts to clone WoW outright. That won't be your impression if you're an avid reader of reviews, where WoW is typically credited with inventing everything from instances (Anarchy Online) to raids (EverQuest's "The Scars of Velious" expansion) to battlegrounds (pick an FPS, Doom maybe) to sliced bread (Otto Rohweedder). The conventional wisdom, simple and deceptive as it seems, is this: to make a successful subscription game, you have to give your audience something absolutely new and compelling enough to pry them lose from another subscription game. That's why I can't credit myriad free-to-play games with clone status; there's little of that once-a-month accountability I have when I enter my online subscriptions in my checkbook.
We're watching the evolution of a category in real time, where every smart developer both picks through what its predecessors brought to the table and then adds something new. For me, WoW is what we were and WAR is what we're becoming, but I've been wrong before. I look forward to learning more about the future of WoW (not to mention Diablo 3, a franchise RPG that drew me in like no other, save maybe Morrowind) at BlizzCon this week and passing that information along to you.
Those are my thoughts, now I want to hear yours. Head to the Loading... forums and have your say.
--
Congrats to Kyle, Zach, and Phyllis who each won a Warhammer Online Prima Games Guide and Atlas bundle as announced in yesterday's Loading... If you missed out on this one, no worries - I'l have another giveaway for you next week!
--
Ten Ton Hammer Epic Thread of the Day
Sometimes they're funny; sometimes they're foolish; sometimes they're flaming;
sometimes they're cool. Whatever this one happens to be, it's
our Epic Thread of the Day.
====================
From our Gold Seller Hall of Shame Forum
WOW GOLD CHANGE EVERYTHING. do you need to buy some wow gold, come on!!!
You want to buy some WoW gold? Well, then you've come to the WRONG place! Ten Ton Hammer said no to gold sellers
a long time ago, and we strictly defend our forums against gold seller
spam. Of course, our admins and moderators do choose the occasional
thread to edit, move to our Gold Seller Hall of Shame,
and leave for the community to mock. You can jump into this thread to
take some shots at poor, banned 5uneed, who tried valiantly to slip his
gold selling spam post past us.
Awesome Quote from the Epic Thread:
"Can we keep this thread open just so we can trash this guy?"
- Twikster
====================
Do you have a favorite Epic Thread? Let us know!
--
11 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 89 in October! 2585 in 2008!
New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today [Thanks Phil Comeau for links and Real World News]
Images/Video
Previews
Interviews
Guides
- Warhammer Online: Public Quest Maps - Barak Varr
- Warhammer Online: Mourkain Temple Tier 2 Guide
- Age of Conan: Sardu's Demonologist Conflagration Prebuild
- Vanguard: Armor Project - Dented Sandforged Armor
- Vanguard: Monster Project - Trisshsal
- Vanguard: Monster Project - Thrazzshar
- Vanguard: Monster Project - Fiend of Xennu
Hot Content - Or, what I took a fancy to:
- Age of Conan: Behind the Scenes with the Official Soundtrack
- Warhammer Online: Strategy Guide and Atlas Bundle
- World of Warcraft: Is WotLK Content in Patch 3.0 a Good Thing?
- Age of Conan: Game Designer Craig 'Silirrion' Morrison
- Stargate Worlds: Date Announcement!
- Champions Online: Dev Q&A with Daniel Stahl
- Otherland: Q&A with Sr. Producer Kevin Buckner
- Jeff Lyndon: An Interview with an Ex-Gold Farm Operator
Real World News
-
Great Pumpkin tops 1900 lbs. [Courtesy of Matt N.!]
But is he too fat to fly? Linus to find out and catch him in the act. -
Formula for Ig Nobel fame: Strippers and Coke [Courtesy of Matt N.!]
Formula for how Cadbury gets the caramel in a Caramilk bar still unknown -
FLA strip club offers free flu shots
Innoculation against diseases the strippers are carrying costs extra
Thanks for visiting Ten Ton Hammer!
- Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer Team
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our World of Warcraft Game Page.
