Summer is a slow time and a busy time. Slow in MMOG news and busy time in my life. What’s going on the MMOG world these days? Well not much. For a month or so we’ve been quiet but lets sum up a few things that happened and some things to look forward to.

World of Warcraft has been dialing up the 3.2 patch with many changes. Some of these changes are great for players rerolling alts with the heirlooms that increase experience gain and lowering costs on mount and the training at different levels. They’ve also included ways for up coming players to catch up gear wise with some badge gear changes. However is this enough to keep players playing WOW? WOW is nearing on five years old, it’s becoming dated. If Everquest came out in 1999 and five years later Warcraft came along in 2004… Well you can guess. It’ll be interesting to see if Blizzard announces the IP of their secret MMOG at the next Blizzcon.

Mortal Online is gearing up for their first closed beta program. It should be interesting. They are going in same design theory as Darkfall, which by the way, opened up here in the US. Here’s to them succeeding.

Aion is closing in with their fourth Beta Test Weekend allowing US and EU players to level through 25. They’ve announced a release date of September 22nd with the release version of 1.5. This brings all the goodies and balances the Koreans had to go through. Good for NCSoft West.

Nothing has been heard of or from either Jumpgate Evolution or Black Prophecy.

Scott Hartsman formerly of SOE and Everquest 2 is now a free agent in the game development world. He received quite the fanfaire on the FOH forums.

This I wasn’t expecting.

I’m incredibly flattered by the positives, and at least half agreeing with the negatives.

The thing about being the public face for anything that has a significant audience of passionate people is that you’re going to inspire a couple different things:

a) Disproportionate positive reaction from people who liked you or what you helped make.

b) Disproportionate negative reaction from people who don’t like or don’t know you or what you helped make.

The most public people always get either too much credit or too much blame, simply because people know their names. I’d go so far as to say that the strength of the reactions have far more to do with how much of a public figure you are than they do with any actual work you did.

As for my current free agency – I’ve been in this state for three days. Finished the last of the paperwork an hour ago. To be fair, it’s not entirely accurate to characterize anything as: “…hasn’t been picked up yet.”

After working pretty much straight through the last year and change, helping build an entirely new kind of games company from the ground up, doing everything from production, to game design, to writing some code, to management, to operations, to community work, and hell, to facilities work… I’m extremely fortunate in that I have some time to make measured, intelligent decisions about what to do next, and I plan on taking advantage of that.

Copernicus, Curt Schilling’s MMOG, is still a mystery and they aren’t budging but that never stops Curt from talking about how wonderful everything is internally.

Age of Conan came back with a new patch. It did wonders for the game. If anything it’s worth trying out just for the DX10 godrays. Awesome stuff since the game actually runs well now.

If you want to chat, or play some Aion with me this weekend, stop by my guilds website (Geist) and drop me a line. I’ll be playing through the weekend as an Asmodian on the Israphel server.

Stay tuned for news updates as I get things back order.

Cheers,
Draegan