Which looks more interesting to you, the Star Trek MMO, or the Star Wars MMO.

Both look really interesting.
 

What do you think about patch 3.1?
Will Uludar be enough for the hardcore raiders?
Is 1000g too much to pay for Dual-Specs?
What are your overall opinions of the upcoming patch.
 

I read your article about guild progression missing from world of warcraft and found it quite interesting. Do you have any ideas on the subject like for example what kinds of features would you include in the game to make guild working together actually work? How would you reward a guild on such work? Any additional work also needs its rewards.

I found the idea interesting because currently I'm in a guild which raids, but I'm not able to raid myself. I'd love to help the guild out, but currently my helping out is rendered to potion farming and what not :).
 

I have a few suggestions for how to improve guild progression in a fairly simple way:
- Make faction status apply to both the individual and the guild. You get treated as whichever is the higher.
- For every 10 points of faction status you gain, your guild gains 1 point (these numbers are plucked out of the air - may be too low a ratio).
- That way, you can help your guild in everything you do, by getting them benefits throughout the game.
- You automatically lose those benefits if you leave the guild, so such a decision would have consequences.
- Introduce guild status tokens as rewards for everyone who kills a boss in a raid instance. Once your guild has (for example) 25 status tokens of a particular tier, its members can buy gear 2 tiers below the guild's current raiding status from special vendors (at a suitable price). This would simplify the process of newer members & alts catching up with those on the leading edge, helping to minimise the divergence between the faster and slower members which can split guilds apart.
- Any gear bought using guild status is only useable while you are a member of a guild with the appropriate status. This still allows people to move guilds, but prevents them joining for an hour just to buy the epics.
 

Last week I was traveling in Ireland.
One thing that I noticed is total absence of PC games in shops.

In Italy is pretty easy to buy PC games. But all shops I found in Dublin (even specialized ones like GameStop) were selling only console titles.

What about other countries?
And how this is related to the drop of sells of PC titles?
PC Games sell less and so shops are starting to not sell them? or the other way around, companies are less interested in selling PC games so, being harder to find, are sold in less quantities?

Do you think that in some case software giants are looking at console market as a better one as you don't have to develop for multiple hardware compatibility? So easier to develop?
 

I have a few suggestions for how to improve guild progression in a fairly simple way:
(bunch of suggestions)
This still allows people to move guilds, but prevents them joining for an hour just to buy the epics.

A lot of those suggestions do sound nice (Like "individual reputation improves guild reputation"), but one suggestion I would like added to those is something like "players can be a member of two guilds", one of which follows similar rules as now. That way, people who liked progression raiding could have a spare guild where they could switch guilds for raids, but still could have their "group of friends" guild with less pressure in terms of loot issues and such, avoiding some of the drama that way.

(Or it might just create more drama about guild members splitting their time the wrong way, or reputation leachers, etc.)

On the dual spec feature, did I read right that it only comes intio play at level 80? If so, it seems to waste an important benefit of having two specs (One leveling, one for preferred group stuff). If not, just ignore this question I guess.
 

"On the dual spec feature, did I read right that it only comes intio play at level 80?"
I read recently that they had changed their mind from 80 to 40, but it wasn't from a Blizzard source, so take it with a pinch of salt.
 

I read recently that they had changed their mind from 80 to 40, but it wasn't from a Blizzard source, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Hopefully that is true, since level 40 seemed pretty close to the level range where talent specs really started to diverge in killing speed, and in effectiveness in lower level instances at least. (A bit higher, but still somewhat close. this may have changed with the talent tree changes and mounts, though.)
 

@Dillon

I can understand why a raid guild might not want players to be in any other guilds but their own, but is it really a problem? I have a friend who is in two raiding guilds on our main server and also has a level 80 alt on another server. In my own case, I have my main in a social raid guild and an alt in another guild, plus a 58 on my friend's server and we are guilded together. So in my example we have two players with toons crossing over five different guilds...I just don't see the problem that you are referencing.
 

WoW should do this, purely for entertainment value / player retention:

Old world instance / raid queues where you can sign up for any class and when a full group is formed, you all pop up with a character of the appropriate class/level inside of the instance. Once inside, the players can decide amongst themselves what "difficulty" they want the instance to be and talk to the appropriate armour-master to pick up their gear (green, blue, or purple). There will not be better rewards for choosing a higher difficulty, just a greater probability of successfully completing the dungeon, if that is what you so desire.

If it is not too much of a memory sink, the server could keep track of what players get what drops and allow them to equip those items on subsequent runs in similar level dungeons, or the whole thing could just be for fun and not give any reward at all other than a couple of hours of entertainment for each run. I am extremely hesitaint to suggest any kind of reward for the main character, even if it is just titles, because that will lead to a loss of fun as players maximize efficiency.

What do you think Tobold? Is the old world content good enough that it can be enjoyed by players who are simply experiencing the content at an appropriate level, without actually getting a "reward"?
 

I wonder if you care to comment on dual specs as that has become something of a hot topic on other blogs:

http://foreveranoob.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/dual-spec-craziness/
http://thebigbearbutt.com/2009/02/25/dual-spec-i-agree-with-the-noob/

are very much against it while

http://spinksville.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/5-things-i-want-from-dual-specs/

is more in favour.
 

I can understand why a raid guild might not want players to be in any other guilds but their own, but is it really a problem? I have a friend who is in two raiding guilds on our main server and also has a level 80 alt on another server. In my own case, I have my main in a social raid guild and an alt in another guild, plus a 58 on my friend's server and we are guilded together. So in my example we have two players with toons crossing over five different guilds...I just don't see the problem that you are referencing.

Are you referring to the "two guilds could cause ...issues", or "We should add two guilds to deal with"?

(As for whether problems exist, for the reasons to have two guilds, I'm talking about issues I've heard with raiding and how to possibly solve them. As for issues of what new problems two guilds a character would introduce, I'm talking theoretical problems based somewhat on current loot and other competition issues. I do admit that I don't have direct experience with this stuff, and am mostly working off other people's descriptions.)
 

~ Tank Shortage ~

Tank shortage is the topic I wish to discuss. On my server (madoran), we still regularly look for tanks for PUGs. I thought the new hero class, the Death Knights, would help this, but I'm still seeing the same as in TBC. "LF1M (insert instance name) need tank". Anyone else seeing this?

An interestingly enough, there never seem to be a shortage of healers, which is what I play (holy priest). And the talks going around are that the next hero class will probably be a healer class. Gosh, no thank you.