Author Archives: SynCaine

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About SynCaine

Former hardcore raider turned casual gamer.

Camelot Unchained: A good first impression

Posted on February 8, 2013 by SynCaine

Snowmageddon will not stop my blogging! Camelot Unchained is making noise of late thanks to Mark Jacobs sharing some details. I’m not going to link to all of the info, but it’s out there and you should go check it … Continue reading →

Posted in Camelot Unchained, MMO design | 8 Comments

Camelot Unchained has a release date!

Posted on February 5, 2013 by SynCaine

More on this tomorrow or the next day, but just a quick comment: we are making hype videos with a date for launching games on kickstarter now? Bit… odd, right? And do they expect to get all 10m from kickstarter? … Continue reading →

Posted in Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online | 12 Comments

The difficulty of depth

Posted on February 1, 2013 by SynCaine

Jester’s excellent Fractal post is well worth reading, and it’s just one example of the deep, multilayered posts frequently made about EVE. If you read enough blogs with enough variety, I’m sure you have picked up on this as well. … Continue reading →

Posted in crafting, EVE Online, MMO design, PvP, World of Warcraft | 25 Comments

Octo-moms will finally have the gear they deserve

Posted on February 1, 2013 by SynCaine

The current state of WoW raiding everyone: If you wipe in lfr 90% of the time its down to 1 of 2 things. Firstly too many people are afk, I wiped 4x on tsulong last week until we finally had … Continue reading →

Posted in Rant, World of Warcraft | 31 Comments

UO Forever: More lessons

Posted on January 28, 2013 by SynCaine

UO Forever has been a great time so far, both from just a pure gameplay perspective and as a refresher of sorts on how the MMO genre got started and the design decisions that worked. I’ve covered combat already, as well … Continue reading →

Posted in Combat Systems, crafting, Housing, MMO design, Ultima Online | 5 Comments

WAR’s legacy

Posted on January 23, 2013 by SynCaine

Nice interview by Massively with Mark Jacobs. He makes some good points. WAR’s hype was inexpensive and very effective. The point of hype is to get people interested enough to buy; for WAR, that worked. My only question would be … Continue reading →

Posted in MMO design, Warhammer Online | 24 Comments

Commenting on Blogger

Posted on January 23, 2013 by SynCaine

Is it just me or is commenting on Blogger-hosted blogs massively frustrating? Between the login errors, the captcha that is impossible to read half the time, to it eating what you wrote, it takes me ten times as long to … Continue reading →

Posted in Rant, Site update | 18 Comments

UO Forever: Death by dragonfire

Posted on January 22, 2013 by SynCaine

While Aventurine continues to uphold the DF:UW NDA, and :stuff:, I’ve decided to entertain myself with a bit of UO:F, joining up with Keen and his crew. So far it’s been very enjoyable overall, and also leads to one amusing … Continue reading →

Posted in MMO design, Ultima Online | 16 Comments

MMO housing IS gameplay

Posted on January 17, 2013 by SynCaine

And yes, I’ve heard the Ultima Online house analogy. But until I can plant a flower box outside my POS, I don’t buy it. EVE ain’t Minecraft. Going to pick on Jester a bit in this post. I say pick … Continue reading →

Posted in EVE Online, Housing, Lord of the Rings Online, MMO design, Ultima Online | 15 Comments

Three hours

Posted on January 17, 2013 by SynCaine

In the comments of yesterday’s post, frequent commentator Saucelah suggested that playing an MMO for three straight hours (the comment said five, but let’s work with three, because I think that was my original ask in some post. If not … Continue reading →

Posted in Random, Rant | 21 Comments