Each week, two MMORPGs will face each other until only one is left. You will be able to vote and leave comments for each game on special pages solely dedicated to this tournament. For example, you can leave a 10 for the game you love and then a 0 for the game you hate. This is a battle after all! The game with the highest total score at the end of each week (Thursday morning at 12:01 A.M. CST) will move on. Comments that capture the spirit of the battle without bad language and overuse of caps will be displayed in the results article at the end of the week. There will be a total of 15 matches and the tournament will begin on October 25, 2007. Flashback to what happened with the also-dead Sims Online: "UGC is very important and is coming any day, as soon as we can talk the lawyers into it." But the real problem here, I think, was that Google's core business is contextual advertising based on datamining.

GameOgre.com will have 16 of the top MMORPGs square off against each other in battles to the death in order to determine the MMORPG champ. The winning MMORPG will also be the MMORPG of the Year at GameOgre.com's 2007 Online Game Awards. Since the goal is to find only one winner, Free MMORPGs and Pay-to-Play MMORPGs will be able to go head-to-head with each other. This tournament will also be a major factor in determining the Best Free MMORPG of the Year. UGC? This is where Google should, in theory, be able to pull off something interesting. They own YouTube, after all (they bought it). But here's the tricky point: despite what popular pundits may think, virtual worlds and UGC don't always blend well. They are not peanut butter and chocolate, they are caramel and fish.

Most game developers have a vision when creating a game. They decide what type of game they want to make, and where they want to go with it. This isn’t any different with MMORPGs, and we seem to forget that sometimes. When companies create and develop a game, they want to take it in a certain direction, they want to do what they think is best for the game. Let’s take World of Warcraft for example. World of Warcraft at this point is a game that is owned by the community. Blizzard implements things that the players want to see, completely overlooking their original intentions often forsaking their characters, and their lore to create a simplistic type of game-play that will earn them a ton of money. You can give some credit to Age of Conan for being the first big title to reintroduce PvP back into a stale MMO world, however considering the absolute debacle that followed, that’s all the credit that can be given. Warhammer Online not only brought back PvP, but did it right straight out of the gate.

It seems with the success of Warhammer Online and it’s impressive RvR (PvP) system that PvP is back in a big way. So big that the almighty juggernaut Blizzard is considering changing the way their current PvP system works. In a recent post on the Blizzard forums, it was stated “we want to give you the ability to queue for Battlegrounds from anywhere in the world”. This is one of the best features that Warhammer introduced, being able to join a PvP battle from anywhere at anytime. Not only will Blizzard be adding this to WoW, but I’m sure this will become a must have feature for all future MMOs that have PvP. Apart from adding this feature, it seems Blizzard is reconsidering its entire PvP system. After all if PvP is back they don’t want World of Warcraft to be left in the dust.

Yesterday Turbine announced the official date for the first expansion to Lord of the Rings online as Nov 18th 2008, just over a month from now. While I haven’t played my hunter for about 8 months now, some of the additions to the game sound very exciting. All the information on the upcoming Mines or Moria expansion have already been available online for many months, so I’m not going to cover what’s new, you can read my Mines of Mora announced post for details on that. The one new feature I will talk about are the new Legendary items. These are weapons and class-related equipment that the player can forge them and that level up along with the player. Turbine was kind enough to provide us with some screenshots of these new legendary items so check it out.

This issue is critical because most people will opt to take the fastest route to advancement, and if the overworld becomes empty this game will fail. Ooooh, if they stay for a month or two, I get a free epic land mount. Well let’s see that takes about 600 gold out of the economy’s pocket. If the players don’t have to work, why would they contribute and make money? This mount isn’t even that cool. And finally With player- summoning the player will not have to travel and see the world he’s playing in, with this they won’t stumble upon realizations about the game and how to get here or there or anywhere, they’ll simply wait until their buddy logs on. These players are already going to be half-baked; blizzard at least gives them some chance and let them grow a work-ethic! Maybe this will add a more fun pvp experience for the Warcraft veteran?

If I am at my maximum range and shoot at someone running towards me, they will be in melee range by the time the move is finished executing. Kiting is not even close to being a viable option in RvR. My root barely works and is a melee attack, so by the time someone is close enough that I need it, I’m dead anyways. Magus and Engineers need to be looked at as well. These are also uncommon classes because they suffer from similar problems. Both of these classes have an ability that is going to ruin this game if it is not fixed. Electromagnet on the Engineer and the Magus version is an ability that sucks in all plays from 65 feet away, has no casting time, only has a 20 second cooldown, has no line of sight check (can pull people through keep doors in sieges), and snares!

I wasn’t surprised when I found out that the addition of this spell was something that happened right near the end of beta, so probably has not undergone the proper testing. The sad thing is that this is one of the few good tools these classes have at end game, so they need to be brought up a little while this ability gets fixed. Witch Elves strike me as a bit out of control. I often find myself unable to fight back almost every single time they attack me, even with all of my counter-measures up. They can kill me in about 4 seconds flat while incapacitating me. Now as someone who wears light armor I guess that might be feasible, but Ironbreaker guildmates of mine have been destroyed almost as fast. The ability that damages you for moving has no limit to how much it can do, and when factored with how easy they can kill when you aren’t moving there is little anyone can do in most cases. There is nothing fun about not being able to fight back, something DAOC was notorious for.

Overall the game remains solid for what it is. The overworld RvR is enjoyable when it happens, and the gameplay is overall good. When you compare this game in its present state after 1 month to games like WoW and Age of Conan, it definitely has a lot going for it. These issues however summarize what I believe are the top concerns of the community, as you can find on most forums and in game whining. The good news is Mythic is definitely listening to the player feedback. Recently they made a change in a patch that has reduced the number of gold spammers noticeably. People were upset about the leveling curve in certain tiers of the game and Mythic reacted by increasing the quest experience in these areas of the game. They are keeping a sharp eye on the community and reacting to their needs. If they continue to maintain this level of communication and honesty with the players, this game will be around for a long time.

These most likely won’t make people quit, but they will test the nerves of the players. The guild interface is absolutely amazing, but it has bugs that need fixing. Some players in my guild have to be manually promoted by typing out the command because the interface hates them. The alliance tab has some glitches making it hard to read at times. The guild heraldry shows to other players, but on my screen I don’t see it unless I toggle it off and on every time I zone. Altdorf still causes me crash almost every time I go there for no real reason. I still can’t join a scenario from some zones randomly. I could go on but you get the drift. By far one of the most annoying things is the current state of the mail system. It literally took me 5 minutes to open 3 mails and remove the items attached to them.