Nothing innovative here, but solid execution. Combat is fast, which is a definitive plus. Other than that, combat is the usual mix of an auto-attack with the occasional special attack thrown in. Quests are likewise pretty much standard, you talk to a NPC, he sends you off to kill 40 wolves, you return and get a reward. No animations in the quests storytelling like in FFXI, but a few of the stories are actually funny. The NPC asking you to kill the 40 wolves is Little Red Riding Hood, now clearly demented from being the only survivor of the wolf eating her family, and speaking with her dead grandmother. Quests have a minimum level, which is a good idea, so you don't try to go on a dragon-killing quest at low levels. Another nice touch is a NPC guide for new players, telling them what mobs they can kill at their level, and pointing out the first two NPC that give quests.

I didn't like it. To some extent, I think the developers of the current virtual world Warhammer Online are in the same kind of pickle. In this case, one of the serious issues in the game’s design is that it is almost impossible for players to understand how to achieve victory for their faction. There are two major factions in the game which fight to control certain parts of the game environment at varying stages of the progression of the player-characters. In the endgame, both factions try to accomplish a series of difficult challenges that will allow them to attack and control the major city of their rival faction. At the moment, it is very hard to tell exactly how these systems work, and I think that is not because the players have yet to figure the system out, but because the interaction of many diverse elements in the game design is so messy that it is impossible to figure it out, possibly even for the designers. Okay, that was maybe a bit TOO mini. :)

I've already mentioned it once or twice. But if you are currently waiting for the next great game to be released, or if you need a MMORPG you can safely play on any office computer, or if you are simply in a philosophical mood thinking about the sense of playing a MMORPG at all, Progressquest is the game you should download and install on your computer immediately. It is free, and the download is only 315 kB. And it contains ALL the elements of a classical MMORPG like Everquest. Give it a try! Somebody who likes playing a kickass bounty hunter, probably the most powerful combat class, will NOT want to give up all his combat skills and become a master chef, master dancer, or master image designer. And somebody who is happy with a peaceful career as any sort of crafter or entertainer, will NOT be happy to be told that he has to master tera kasi (Kung Fu) and kill lots of monsters with his bare hands.

For example we horribly bungled our Final Fantasy XI chapter, although you could say that this was in part the games fault, as it makes it artificially difficult to play in a group with your friends. But us all being grown-ups, we usually manage to handle problems in a mature and reasonable way. The important thing is to not forget that these MMORPG are just games, a form of entertainment. Certainly doing well in a game is a possible goal, but friendship has a higher value than that. So members are expected to share items, and to preferentially group with other guild members, even if that would make a group that is slightly sub-optimal. I joined The Echelon in Earth and Beyond, and played both Star Wars Galaxies and Final Fantasy XI with them. And I'm looking forward to play City of Heroes with them as soon as I get into that game.

That doesn't mean you have to be over 30 to join (although many are), it just means that you have to realize that friendship and loyalty are worth a lot more than experience points and "phat loot". We'd rather be close-knit than the most powerful guild of the game we are currently playing. That also means we don't just accept anybody into the guild. But if you get in, The Echelon is the last guild you ever need to join, as it will be present in all the major games you start playing in the future. Currently The Echelon has full chapters in City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies, Asherons Call 2, and Horizons. But there are some of us playing other games, they just didn't get "full chapter" status (or lost it) because they are either dying out (EQ, EnB, Shadowbane) or somehow didn't fit into our "among friends" playstyle (Lineage 2, Final Fantasy XI). Naturally we will have a full chapter in World of Warcraft later this year.

Soloing in World of Warcraft in most cases isn't very exciting if you are of average skill or above. If a game is too easy, it isn't challenging enough to be fun. That is why so many people rush through the leveling game and try to get to the level cap as quickly as possible, even paying other people for power-leveling them to there. At the level cap you can group, and you can raid, and while you still don't need to be a rocket scientist to successfully group or raid, you definitely need more skill for that than for soloing. You need to watch what the other players in your group or raid are doing, and the combats last longer, forcing you to think about concepts like mana efficiency or regeneration.

If you take 10 million random people and sort them by height, you'll get a bell curve called a Gauss curve, or "normal distribution": There are very few very tall people, some tall people, lots of average height people, some small people, and very few very small people. The reason this is called a normal distribution is because most natural distributions look like this. And although it is much harder to measure, if you sorted the 10 million World of Warcraft players by skill, you'd get the same distribution. 7ou'll get everything from low skill to extremely skilled, with the large majority being somewhere in the middle. Only the very low skill end of the curve is missing, because people who don't have enough skill to even do one quest won't play very long. And the learning curve for WoW isn't steep at all.

The other exciting thing about the end of season is that the contracts of many players run out. You can only auto-extend the contracts of 5 of your players, for the others you'll have to bid against any other manager. As there is still too much money in the economy, some rich managers bid very high wages, up to 50k per day for world class players. But I bid much lower amounts for good, not-quite-world-class players, and got some good improvements and reserves on the cheap. And the same is true with every other game. People have different skills in video gaming. And if your skill isn't high enough for the minimum skill level needed to succeed, you don't play. I suck at first person shooters, so I don't play them. Which means my dollars are lost to the game companies making first person shooters.

But as I mentioned before, playing a football manager in an online game isn't for everybody. It's great for strategists like me, but boring for people who want a bit more action. But one of my readers wrote me and alerted me to another online football game coming out soon: Football Superstars. Here you don't play a football manager, but a football player. The games are actual 11 vs. 11 "PvP" matches, with only the goalkeepers being AI controlled, the other 10 players on each side are controlled by humans. The game is download for free, play for free, probably with microtransactions for fancy outfits somewhere thrown in. Because when you aren't playing a match, you can hang out in bars or the gym, and chat with the other players, everything is 3D.

Sorry for being late with the open Sunday thread, but I was busy with holiday activities. Anyway, here it is, your thread to suggest subjects and talk about whatever you like. This post is about online versions of what Europeans call football, which differs from American football in that it is actually played with the feet only. You might know it under the name of "soccer". I'm in the last week of my holidays, and when I wasn't going out or doing other holiday stuff, I basically spent most of my computer time playing the beta of Football Manager Live. FML is organized in seasons taking about one real-world month each. And I just started less than a month ago, so for the first time I'm experiencing the end of a season. And it's exciting! I'm currently 4th in my division, so I'll probably make the playoffs, and get a chance for promotion to the premiership of the "early evening football association" I'm in.