Tag: game design

  • Boom Beach: No HQ 23 in the Works Claimed by Supercell

    Over on the reddit forums, an official FAQ went out on the new Builders talking about their decision making process for adding Builders to the game. One particular nugget of information though was that they also admitted that they were not immediately working on an HQ 23, although in the future they might. What does…

  • Old Game Reviews: Wizard’s Crown

    Prior to the gold box set AD&D games, SSI had Wizard’s Crown, which I heard had the basis for the combat engine for the gold box series. Wizard’s Crown was one of the original true hardcore CRPGs and quite difficult even when you had the game set to the lowest difficulty level (and I believe…

  • Diablo 3: 7 Fun Builds that Got Nerfed into Oblivion

    Today, I want to talk about various fun builds in Diablo 3 that got nerfed into nothingness. These builds aren’t necessarily great builds for pushing high Greater Rifts nor are they ones that may have been universally loved. They are builds that I played at some point that may have been Meta or at least…

  • Diablo 3: More Ideas on Improving Competitive Leaderboards

    While writing my previous Diablo 3 blog, something hit me about the idea of competitive play. Right now, the only source of competition is the highest Greater Rift one can achieve in a season. Unfortunately, the game burns people out quickly especially after the first week since everything revolves around pushing the highest Greater Rift.…

  • Diablo 3: Too Many Nerfs to Crowd Control and Solution to Seasonal Leaderboards

    This latest patch will bring more nerfs to crowd control. Obviously, the issue Blizzard is attempting to resolve is perma-cc situations, which usually are part of the group meta as they seem to want people just playing pure damage builds rather than support builds. There’s been quite a number of nerfs over time to CC…

  • World of Warcraft: Unsubbed and Ecstatic!

    I ended up getting sick again over this weekend and didn’t finish up a few pre-pre-patch items on my agenda yesterday. I was sad knowing that the game was going to nerf a bunch of gold making outlets from Garrison missions. But I had been reading notes and general forum complaints periodically just to keep…

  • World of Warcraft: The Pointlessness in Class (Re-)Design

    Since being a player of World of Warcraft from Wrath of the Lich King, I became accustomed to the idea of how Blizzard will revamp classes each expansion. It’s natural in any RPG where as characters increase in power, so do the way they behave. In an expansion, that would mean adding abilities to show…

  • World of Warcraft: Pre-Legion Thoughts

    I haven’t written on World of Warcraft for a while now. Although I occasionally play it from time-to-time and periodically check out new features for the upcoming Legion expansion, for the most part I’ve been uninterested and unmotivated in playing. I do keep up in watching some streams but despite some of the hype, I’m…

  • Diablo 3: How to Potentially Solve the Solo vs Multiplayer Gap

    Multiplayer will always have an advantage in Diablo 3 because fundamentally one of Blizzard’s core values is on the social aspect of gaming. Thus, playing in a group would (and probably should) exhibit clear benefits. But having a solid group in Diablo 3 also means gaining a massive advantage both in terms of items from…

  • World of Warcraft: Private Vanilla Server Going Bye Bye Controversy

    So there’s a huge controversial issue about the Vanilla WoW private server Nostalrius where Blizzard’s legal department did a shutdown. The shutdown caused the community to start a petition for Blizzard to look into starting their own legacy WoW servers. The goal is to meet 200k signatures. There’s a lot of issues in this situation…