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Saying Goodbye to The Realm Online

Today while I work on the YuriCorp Community Minecraft server, I am reminded of the origins of online multiplayer games: MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). MUDs were text-based online games, often accessed using Telnet, that allowed multiple users to play together. MUDs were the genesis of the MMOs we play today and early attempts at adding a graphics layer were the very first series of MMOs. That includes The Realm Online. The major downside of early MUDs was that they were entirely text-based. In the 1990s, with slow dial-up internet connections, text was really the only viable option. However, the evolution to graphical MUDs happened quickly. One of the first major graphical MUDs was The Realm Online, released in 1996 by Sierra On-Line The Realm Online was quickly relegated to forgotten memories as Ultima Online (1997) released and was a completely superior experience while EverQuest launched in (1999) making The Realm Online…

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Editorials

Building Blizzard Back Better: New Owners Would Solve World of Warcraft’s Problems

Veteran Internet users know of the turbulent time when Activision bought Blizzard and the gaming community exploded with anger. Of course, this wasn’t the first sell of Blizzard… the gaming company had previously been acquired by Vivendi, Sierra-Online (via CUC) and Davidson & Associates just to sort of measure out a few. Blizzard had a long history with Vivendi and that spree of 1998 to 2008 was pretty much considered their golden years. So, with that said, with all the problems the 2020s have brought Blizzard, what is the solution to their woes? Go back to their glory years where WoW released, Diablo released, StarCraft and StarCraft 2 released, etc. Forget Diablo, It’s Not a “Blizzard” Game Let’s set something straight, Diablo is actually a Condor Games game. Blizzard bought another studio, renamed them Blizzard North and they worked independently from Blizzard. The last thing they produced was in 2001…

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Guides

How to Play Final Fantasy XIV for Free

FFXIV is one of the few MMOs out there that still require a monthly subscription fee, along with the likes of World of Warcraft and uh, I’m sure there is some more out there. Point being, if you want everything the game has to offer you have to pay the subscription fee. Of course, like WoW, Final Fantasy XIV let’s you play for free with some limitations. Unlike WoW, the free trial is actually insanely lofty and pretty much let’s you play most of the game without ever having to subscribe. A Note for Those Who Have Ever Purchased the Base Game Bruh, you’ll have to start over. You’ll have to make an all new Square Enix account in order to play the free trial and, if at any time you upgrade from the free trial, you can not return. So keep that in mind. The good news is that…

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Guides

Avoiding Popular Online Video Game Scams

Over the years automation has taken a powerful hold on online social commentary and allows fraudsters to launch their attacks and scams at scales never seen before. While you’re online, you’re going to want to think of your personal and financial safety when you engage in any monetary transaction. The thing is, it’s very easy to blur the lines between what’s a monetary transaction online and what’s a simple click of a button. Fraudsters use this and launch complicated attacks via bots and other methods to target online users in a variety of categories. Scammers are going try everything they can to separate you from your possessions (virtual and real). Today we’re going to delve into the nuances of scams in the world of video games and MMOs, however the best place to start with the topic is the US Government’s “How to Avoid a Scam” article produced by the…

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Guides

How To Prepare for the Raid Finder in World of Warcraft in 2022

This is a rather short guide, because I have a lot of anxiety when I have a new character I want to run through raid finder and there is a lot of toxic people who instead of going, oh you’re just trying to get some gear, instead go “LOL NOOB” and many other more horrible things and that sucks. So let’s talk about preparing, so you can at least avoid any embarrassment when you load into the raid finder. The first thing to do is understand you’re going to suck if you don’t have gear and that’s totally fine and nothing anyone says matters, as long as you’re DPS or you’re a few months into an expansion and picked healer. If you roll as a tank into raid finder in the minimum required gear, you’re going to have a horrible time. We’ll talk about tanking in a bit. Next you’re…

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Guides

Understanding Limited Run Games and the Game Collector’s Market

Limited Run Games is a publisher of limited runs of physical games. There are other outlets, like Strictly Limited, that do a similar thing but Limited Run Games is what I would consider the industry leader in this very interesting world of limited video game releases. Their popularity recently has continued to only soar as collectors attempt to collect a wide range of their products, from the games they love to those who just love to collect every release. To be completely candid, I recently was looking at MidBoss’s Japanese release of the 2064 collector’s edition and fell immediately in love with the artwork and everything about it. Obtaining the previous US release led me down a long and wild adventure into a niche market that’s exploding in popularity and has a lot of pieces to untangle. The Principles of False Scarcity & A Limited History of Collector’s Editions If…

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Guides

WoW: Shadowlands Renown Catch-Up System Explained

wow arena victory screen

So you’ve just started the new expansion (WoW: Shadowlands) and everyone else has months of Renown and you’ve just hit max level. Maybe you’ve taken a break for awhile and your friends haven’t caught up with you yet. It was super frustrating for me too, at the start of the expansion because it felt like I had to do everything to catch my renown up each week and it was pretty fatiguing. Except the good news is that you don’t have to do every renown quest every week if you don’t want to and if you start later in the expansion, you’ll still be able to farm your way to everyone’s current level. It’s very simple: How to Catch Up To catch your renown up just do anything in the game that rewards you something. Covenant Callings, Battlegrounds, Dungeons, world bosses (once per week), various weekly quests, etc. Most of…

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Editorials

Community is the Reward in an MMO and We’ve Forgotten That

The year was circa 2002. Ragnarok Online was getting long in the tooth and I was invited into a mystical world that existed only until 2005, which was Dark Age of Camelot. The entire game itself was I would argue harder than Dark Souls. Soloing anything was next to near impossible and leveling required a group and lots of patience. FFXI, while not my cup of tea, was in many ways similar and players have similar opinions. The point of the game, the success, came from community. Building community with like minded players who wanted to sit and chat and play a video game together was your reward. It wasn’t power. It wasn’t fame. It wasn’t prize money. It was friendship, something we’ve long long lost in online gaming. To level, you would have to have a stereotypical archetype group of a tank, healer and DPS. The tank could only…

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Editorials

Monetization is Destroying Gaming YouTube and Gaming Video in General

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have. Socrates Greed can ruin the nicest of things. We’re going to take a deep dive today in the history of YouTube and video sharing online and how monetization has completely ruined what was once an innocent form of expression and turned motivation away from passion and into greed. There was once a time when watching video on the Internet was difficult and nearly pointless to do, especially around the year 2000. The popular media format was “Real Media” which was a very high compression format that was “dial-up friendly.” You could fit a lot of video in a small file size in a very small resolution. Which, to be fair, 800×600 was the common high resolution display in those days, so a 320×240 video was nearly half the resolution of…

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Editorials

Games Journalism is Evolving Back to the Community

This is a difficult topic for me because I believe that games journalism is just such a weird thing to begin with. I’ve been writing in this industry now for over 15 years professionally, as in paid to write and it’s still hard for me to even consider myself a journalist. I’ve sourced stories, been featured on TV shows as someone who predicted World of Warcraft going free-to-play and in general have spent most of my time honestly just writing guides and covering games I liked. Here’s the thing, people look at the folks writing about games who do present themselves as journalists and pass some interesting judgements good and bad about their content, but these days it’s actually really hard as a text based site to matter to the marketing companies that are hired by developers and publishers unless you’re the mainstream media. It started back when video was…

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