Rather than listing and commenting directly on Mark Jacobs' State of the Game address, I'll one-up all the other blogs and comment on their commentary-- Okay, to be honest, I slept in this morning and I'm behind, so this is where I catch up. =P

First up, Mythic is adding two new classes in December. The Black Guard and Knight of the Blazing Sun. Class injections are always great, but Syp over at Waaagh! is slightly jaded and this perspective should be acknowledged:

Meanwhile, Lum the Mad had the best summary on the server balancing Mythic has planned, he called it "Consolidation" and threw previous comments from Mythic designers back at them that were originally jabs at other games. I'm gonna lift both quotes here shamelessly:

What happens to low-population servers once you've moved people off them? That's right, this amounts to merging servers. Here's that previous quote now:

For the record, I think they're doing just fine. This is just a jab at Mark Jacobs' tendency towards foot-in-mouth, especially when he trash talks other games.
 

Next up, the state of RvR. I would have preferred if Mark Jacobs was a bit more frank about it and unfortunately my concerns were true: all he's offering are incentives. JoBildo thinks this will work. Myself on the otherhand, I think it'll give a small boost at most but won't make a dent in the long term decline of RvR in WAR:

It's all good news really, I just wish it were more. One needed addition thankfully are some default UI controls for main assist and target-of-target. Keen shows his glee on this and the item-linking as well:

And finally, I really appreciated Mark Jacobs' theories of class balancing, with an ever-upwards positive approach rather than nerfing classes. For this one, I'll quote him directly:

One thing missing was the current state of Public Quests, which are virtually abandoned in many zones. I'm curious to see what Mythic plans for rebalancing and incentivizing PQs, if anything.

All in all, I'd say the game is progressing well, but not quite as well as expected. I thought WAR would top 1 million subscribers in the first month, but now with my expectations adjusted I think that's more likely to happen over the entire Christmas season. I really hope they can push it over the top. I'm not saying they need to have 5+ million subscribers to compete with World of Warcraft, I'm saying I'd like to see them have 5+ million subscribers regardless of any competition.

Somebody comes along and writes something clever and you wish you've written it. That's what Lore Sjöberg has just done with his summary of the 7 Basic Blogpost types over at Wired.

I wanted to summarize them all, but that would be stealing too much of the meat from the thing. Someone should maintain a blog with exactly these categories.

If I had to nitpick: "Animals are cute!" should instead be part of a general "Meme" category instead of shoving those under the holy cult of ego number 7.

What's scary is that I can't read videogame blogs today without thinking it's all just "Something I like, only different!". They're reminding me of the opening scenes of Robert Altman's The Player where movies are pitched as "it's like such-and-such, only a comedy starring Bruce Willis". I was thinking exactly that when I figuratively ran over unfortunate Keen (not so unfortunate, he's doing alright *grin*) with the phrase "armchair designer".

I'm as much a culprit of these formulas creeping in to my own blog.

File the whole thing under "People are dumb!".

I've solidified my plans to blog my experiences in Age of Conan, starting from launch day.

Around the blogosphere, I see a lot of general-purpose MMO / MMORPG blogs, a large number of WoW-specific blogs and a few blogs gearing up for WAR (Warhammer). Although interest seems to be high for Age Conan, I haven't seen any noteworthy blogs specifically about the game.

Mind you, I might be looking in the wrong places, or just not seeing what's directly in front of me. After all, my own blog doesn't have a lot of apparent signs of my plans, other than my just stating them now. Once the game is rolling, the players will be more evident.

I think also, for many people, WAR is the MMO they're waiting for and they've been looking at AoC as the distraction until then. I was much the same way when I played City of Heroes before WoW.

If you spot any good sources of bloggers likely to concentrate on Age of Conan, let me know. If I find myself reading them, I'll drop a link down my left sidebar here (which needs reorganizing anyway).

Funcom has Fun in their name, but of course, fun is subjective.

As Age of Conan approaches its release date, I'm noticing the MMO blogosphere is questioning whether it will perform on launch.

Syncaine @ Hardcore Casual outlines the most important part of all this in "Too WoW-like, a positive or negative?": The Fun Factor.

When WoW was released, it had plenty of problems. It wasn't a clean launch by any stretch of the imagination. In fact I'd say WoW was downright messy even compared to most MMOs, but.. and here's an all-important but... it was still a good launch. Why? Because it was clearly and uninhibitedly fun in a mass-market way. It was obvious within the first couple of weeks that WoW was going to be a resounding success, that it was going to surpass just the Blizzard fanbois and EQ migrators, it was going over the top.

Not too many people remember the problems associated with WoW's messy first few months, because why bother dwelling on it when it no longer matters?

Tycho writes eloquently about WoW's state of dominance, better than I could have put it.

This doesn't mean that there isn't room for other games, in fact I think there's plenty of room within WoW's shadow.

It doesn't matter whether there are bugs, or even if the launch is messy, a game.. any game makes or breaks on the fun factor. The question you should ask yourself when you're deciding to buy a game or not, to invest your dollars and your time, is whether you think you'll enjoy yourself.