GN_chad's blog

Recently, I’ve given into my internal closet nerd and picked up a copy of Cryptic Studios new game, Star Trek Online (STO). Having always been a Star Wars fan, I’ve partaken in more than my fair share of name-calling and joking at the expense of the nefarious Trekkie. In a fair fight, I’m confident any Star Wars fan could pummel a Trekkie into the ground.

Yes, the time has finally come. Apparently my guild and some random FPS clan in Germany were the only two groups of gamers that still used TS. This comes as an extremely sad point in my gaming career as I loved TeamSpeak.

Rushing forward into the enemy lines, I clash with a dwarf Ironbreaker and begin slashing away violently. Quickly, I notice he is being healed by his wing-man - a Rune Priest. Turning my blade to him I snare his legs, slowing his escape, and begin to throttle his face with my axe. Overcome by blood lust I fail to realize that his reinforcements have arrived. Surrounded by five enemies, I realize that I'm surely doomed but, with determination, I swing as hard as I can to take at least one of them down. In the grips of certain death, and a trip back to the spawn point, arrows begin to shower my position - dispatching one of my attackers and finishing off my target. With three opponents left, I start to think that the fight is finally getting fair. To my surprise one of the assailants was harpooned right in the chest by a ballista, reducing his health to half. Realizing their disadvantage, the enemy begins to retreat to the bridge. More arrows rain down and I'm quickly joined by others in my warband as we push towards to the bridge. Four elven warriors hastily move across the bridge in our direction. They slam their shields down in front of them to form a wall. With a loud battle cry our warband clashed into them trying to push them back; arrows rained down and magic burst all around us searing the ground where we stood. This is WAR!

I braved Games Day Baltimore in order to score the scoop on EA/Mythic’s highly anticipated game Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR). There is nothing more disturbing than seeing pale, pasty tabletop gaming nerds mixed with Baltimore’s finest homeless crack whores. It was a bit like a scene out of “The Wire” that went horribly wrong. Pushing my way into the convention center I was greeted with the roar of a million fanatics screaming “Waaargh” as loud as they could. When the doors finally opened, fans went screaming in as if they were storming an enemy castle, frantically going from station to station to satisfy that inner child.

You’ve seen them while farming for mats, or had the mispleasure of killing them for a quest, there are some MOBs in the MMO world that are a waste of pixels. For the Top10 the Guild Network staff collaborated on the MOBs we thought were by far the “dumbest” ever seen.

For this months Sound Off, the staff of Guild Network got together and decided to test our hand at the obligatory list of “Intellectual Propertiess we wish were MMO's”. Yeah, we know other sites have endeavored to take on this task, but we feel pretty confident that the five titles we picked would make awesome MMO's.

This month the Guild Network staff came up with creative ways to deal with exploiters. Let’s face it, not everyone wants to play by the rules so why not be creative in the way you punish them!

All is well within your guild and your community has grown in both success in-game and as a player base. The time may come that you find yourself presented with the possibility of a merger. Perhaps a less fortunate guild is messaging you with the intent to fuse their members with your guild or that guild’s leadership no longer wants to play the game. Leaders of successful guilds are likely to find themselves in talks with other guilds about merging at least once in their gaming career. A merger can push established guilds over a sticking point in-game and provide players in the merged guild the opportunity to engage in new content. If done right, mergers can be a positive for both parties; if executed poorly, a nightmare.

Your guild just recently downed a new boss, or finally landed that crushing blow to your opponent in PvP. Full of victory and pumped with endorphins from the rush and thrill of the game, you tout your accomplishment on the games forums, heralding your success! As soon as you hit submit, you quickly spam the refresh on your browser to see if anyone congratulates your virtual performance but within seconds what was to be your shining moment is destroyed by the vicious flames of the forum troll. If everything wrong with the internet was a foul beast, then far in the darkest regions of the beast's underbelly would be inhabited by the forum troll!

Wandering down the path of geekdom to the dice-rolling, table top games, you will be surprised at the shocking similarities between Blizzard's universe to Games Workshop's worlds of Warhammer (WAR) and Warhammer 40k (W40K). There have often been whispers in the gaming world that much of Blizzard's success was drawn directly from Games Workshops' efforts in the table-top gaming realm. For Blizzard, they beat Games Workshop to the finish line in terms of producing a quality RTS and eventual MMO. However with the upcoming release of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Games Workshop, with the aid of EA/Mythic, may be catching up. There is no arguing that Games Workshop was around before Blizzard but we here at Guild Network want to let the community decide if Blizzard is "borrowing" its best ideas from Games Workshop.