| The Anvil of Crom: A four-month F2P report card Posted: 30 Oct 2011 10:00 AM PDT Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Business models, MMO industry, Opinion, Free-to-play, The Anvil of Crom Greetings barbaric faithful, and welcome to another installment of the Anvil of Crom. In between bouts of getting frustrated with the Isle of the Iron Statues dungeon this week (I know, I know, it's sooooo easy, and how bad can I be if I have trouble with it?!), I've been giving a fair amount of thought to Age of Conan's free-to-play experiment. It's been nearly four months since the devs rolled out the freemium Unchained patch, and that's ample time for me to have formed a few opinions (and to have revised a few others). Join me after the cut for some discussion on what works, what doesn't, and what I hope to see going forward. Continue reading The Anvil of Crom: A four-month F2P report card  The Anvil of Crom: A four-month F2P report card originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 30 Oct 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| League of Legends Shyvana patch delivers Shaco buffs and more Posted: 30 Oct 2011 09:00 AM PDT Filed under: Video, Game mechanics, PvP, News items, Free-to-play, Not So Massively All this week, Riot Games has been releasing snippets of information on League of Legends' upcoming melee carry champion Shyvana, the half-dragon. Shyvana's sneak peek comic hinted that the champion may be able to transform into a full dragon form. When the champion's mechanic preview article went live, we got the first details on how this ability will work. Shyvana builds up stacks of a resource called Fury with each basic melee attack she lands, and once she has enough fury, she can activate her ultimate to transform into a dragon. The ability interestingly has no cooldown, so enemies fighting against Shyvana will need to be aware of how many fury stacks she has to tell when her ultimate is ready. In a new LoL patch preview video, Riot delves into the details of the upcoming Shyvana patch set to introduce the champion alongside a series of balance changes and gameplay tweaks. In addition to the draconic champion's arrival, players will find new champion Graves has been nerfed following feedback demonstrating that he's a little overpowered. Monkey King WuKong will be getting buffs to his offensive capabilities and his decoy ability will see a series of bug-fixes that should make it a more useful skill. Read on to find out how Shaco is being buffed and what's happening with Dominion, to watch the full patch preview video, and to have your say on whether this is a good patch. Continue reading League of Legends Shyvana patch delivers Shaco buffs and more League of Legends Shyvana patch delivers Shaco buffs and more originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 30 Oct 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| Global Chat: October 23-29, 2011 Posted: 30 Oct 2011 08:00 AM PDT |
| The Daily Grind: Are there lore elements you feel don't get used enough? Posted: 30 Oct 2011 06:00 AM PDT Filed under: Lore, Opinion, The Daily Grind, Miscellaneous Most MMOs have a pretty expansive list of lore characters and groups. It's not surprising, really -- the games cover entire continents and worlds, so there have to be a lot of different stories going at any given time. But sometimes an interesting group of villains or interesting story promises don't quite get the attention they deserve. You enjoy what's there, but it feels like a really interesting group or plot thread got dropped in favor of something else. Maybe you felt like the Scarlet Onslaught deserved more attention in World of Warcraft. Maybe you want more stories in Final Fantasy XIV centering around the individual nation conflicts. Perhaps you just wanted to see another series of missions in City of Heroes to wrap up some loose ends from Praetoria. Whatever the case, are there lore elements you feel don't get used as often as they deserve? Or do you think that most of the stories in your game of choice feel just the right length?  Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!The Daily Grind: Are there lore elements you feel don't get used enough? originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 30 Oct 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| The Mog Log: Another course Posted: 29 Oct 2011 06:00 PM PDT Filed under: Fantasy, Final Fantasy XI, Expansions, Opinion, Consoles, The Mog Log For this week's Mog Log, I'm going to start off by making an analogy about what Final Fantasy XI needs for the future. Picture, if you will, a restaurant in which you can order any food imaginable. Sometimes the food takes a little while to get prepared, but it's always cooked just to your taste. It's expensive, and all of the chairs are broken, but it's your favorite place to eat because the virtue of getting whatever you want outweighs all the detriments. Now, let's say you go into that restaurant, sit on one of the broken chairs, and get on the phone to call Square-Enix and tell it to make another expansion for freaking Final Fantasy XI already. Seriously, Wings of the Goddess is practically fossilized at this point. We're on the game's eighth year of operation in North America -- midway through the ninth in Japan -- and boxed editions of WotG require a team of university archaeologists and possibly carbon dating to identify. I never claimed it was a great analogy. Continue reading The Mog Log: Another course The Mog Log: Another course originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 29 Oct 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| The Tattered Notebook: My top six scares in EQII Posted: 29 Oct 2011 04:00 PM PDT Filed under: Fantasy, EverQuest II, Events, in-game, Opinion, Free-to-play, The Tattered Notebook Norrath is currently full of pumpkins, floating candles, and an assortment of odd and unusual masks (ever see a frog dressed as Antonia Bayle?). The Nights of the Dead is one of my favorite in-game holidays, and each year brings even more fun quests and great Halloween-themed items. But EverQuest II has its fair share of scary stuff even when Nights of the Dead is over. Since this week is all about frights and spooks, I present to you some of the top scares in EQII, be they zombies that jump out at you, raid mobs that turn your hair white, or death by sewing. Read on for some truly scary tales! Continue reading The Tattered Notebook: My top six scares in EQII The Tattered Notebook: My top six scares in EQII originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| The Road to Mordor: Party planning committee, assemble! Posted: 29 Oct 2011 02:00 PM PDT Filed under: Fantasy, Lord of the Rings Online, Culture, Events, in-game, Free-to-play, The Road to Mordor Considering that Fellowship of the Ring begins with a huge party -- thrown in honor of Bilbo Baggins' eleventy-first birthday -- I think it's appropriate that Lord of the Rings Online is conducive to parties. I'm not just talking about dev-designed festivals, although those are great; I'm referring to parties that the community whips up from time to time. Part of the appeal of LotRO to me is that it isn't just all about killing and leveling; it's also about exploring and living in this virtual Middle-earth. Life for the Free Peoples means celebrating even in the midst of oppressive evil, and it's in keeping with the spirit of the enterprise to throw a shindig now and then. Turbine's given us quite a few tools and resources to use when assembling a party, and I thought that today we'd take an unusual detour from the Road to Mordor and go through the steps of throwing a memorable and enjoyable soirée. Ready to cut loose? Footloose? Good! Let's tear up the dance floor! Continue reading The Road to Mordor: Party planning committee, assemble! The Road to Mordor: Party planning committee, assemble! originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 29 Oct 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| ArenaNet unearths treasure trove of lost Guild Wars concept art Posted: 29 Oct 2011 12:00 PM PDT Filed under: Fantasy, Guild Wars, Culture, Lore, MMO industry, Wallpapers, News items, Dev Diaries ArenaNet has always taken Guild Wars concept art very seriously, edeavouring to make the in-game graphics match the concept as closely as possible. This is particularly true of Guild Wars and its upcoming sequel Guild Wars 2, both of which feature gorgeous vistas and impressive architecture. A lot of the original Guild Wars concept art has made its way to the public, where it offers us a glimpse of the visual targets for Ascalon, Kryta, Tyria and beyond. In a new devblog, ArenaNet's David Campbell unearths a treasure trove of previously unseen concept art for Guild Wars' Eye of the North expansion. David explains that these five postcard-style pieces were experiments by the art team to create distinctive environments using a variety of colour palettes. Among the postcards, you'll find forested areas, epic cliff-faces, enclosed valleys and even frozen tundra. ArenaNet unearths treasure trove of lost Guild Wars concept art originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 29 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Normally we pass on Mac or iPhone specific news, but just in case it ever comes up in a debate, 9 to 5 Mac has proven that without a doubt, Apple is indeed shafting iPhone 4 customers. It seems an enterprising young hacker by the name of Steven Smith has not only ported the Siri AI interface to the iPhone 4, but the 
We do our best to report the truth here at Maximum PC, but sometimes companies just don't make it easy. First Microsoft tells us the Zune is dead, 
Back in mid-September AMD turned its elite team of overclockers loose on one of its upcoming Bulldozer chips, the FX-8150, and ended up earning a Guinness World Record in the process. 8429.38 MHz was a pretty impressive feat, but as with anything in technology, it was short lived. The overclocking crown has officially been passed to 
A new report at Computerbase.de (
When even the purpose of our own existence continues to be a mystery, Taiwan-based ITG has every right to sell a desktop OS-running phone that apparently has no clearly defined purpose. By the same token, it also has the right to come up with a successor to that pointless phone. And that's exactly what ITG plans to do.
