Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

I'm somewhat the exact opposite of Dorganth in that I tend to stay away from the database end of things. For me it's one of those things that simply takes the discovery aspects out of playing an MMO. I'd just rather be pleasantly surprised getting X drop from X mob vs. knowing what percent of the time that item drops and spending hours trying to obtain it. An armor database is something I *sometimes* use, but that's only for games like EQ2 that don't have a 'dressing room' feature and I like seeing what armor will look like before I purchase it for crazy pirate prices.

Overall I thing TTH does a good job as a focused news source for MMOs. I will admit that I do somewhat narrow my focus on the news headlines on the home page, mainly because it seems the feature links linger for fairly long periods of time.

The 'latest forum posts' is another small spot that could use some sort of indicator as to which game's forum the post was made in. I think the forum communities on the site are one of it's strong points, vs. it being one of the primary reasons why I refuse to create / use a log-in name for sites like mmorpg.com as the community at that site seems to focus on the negative to an extreme.

The Dev interaction idea is a great one I think. The segment of the game community that 'does' focus on the negatives so much tends to adopt a very us vs. them mentality, as though game devs are some mythical 20-headed beast of doom that's clueless about the games it creates. Anything to break that barrier is a good idea in my opinion. I wouldn't mind if an event like you described wasn't extremely intimate if it helps a larger number of your reader base to attend.

Oh, one other thing re: guides / databases etc. A lot of sites will have 'class guides' that tend to focus on things like skill / spell lists or where to solo at x level, but I rarely see interesting articles on what a class is actually like to play. What are it's strengths / weaknesses etc, or what points in that class' advancement do you obtain truly game-changing skills? An example would be EQ2. Although they dropped the 'archetype' system that would lump classes together until reaching level 20, there's still a fair number of them that will have nearly the exact same skill / spell list for the first 15 or so levels which can make it hard to know why one class might fit your playstyle more than another 20 levels later.