shadowlands – Kaylriene

Difficulty Ramps and How Endgame-Focused MMOs Fail To Onboard Players

I find difficulty discussion in games quite tedious, because it sparks the most elitist, garbage takes one can imagine. Soulsborne games get this the worst, but all… Read more “Difficulty Ramps and How Endgame-Focused MMOs Fail To Onboard Players”

Today the pre-orders for the next WoW expansion went up, with a bold declaration – that the expansion will be launched and running by December 31st, 2022.… Read more “World of Warcraft Dragonflight Is Launching This Year (Question Mark)”

Role stats are dead. Sorta. If you play only WoW, I just said something that hasn’t meant a damn thing in around 6 years – back in… Read more “The Role of Role Stats in a Role Playing Game and Their Death in MMOs”

The Dragonflight expansion announcement last month was…odd. It was weird because of a confluence of factors – COVID-19 delays to Shadowlands’ entire content pipeline, how late it… Read more “What If Being Good Isn’t Enough? Dragonflight and the Looming Specter Of Activision-Blizzard News”

After a chunk of heavier posts on issues facing the MMO community(mostly the FFXIV one!), I wanted to look at something lighter but also still interesting to… Read more “Evokers Are The First Non-Tank Spec Class Added To WoW, But Why?”

There definitely wasn’t anything else in the news around WoW or Blizzard that was worth discussing this week, right? Okay, okay – that…thing also happened, but I… Read more “World of Warcraft’s Social Contract And The Reaction”

On Monday, I wrote and published a post looking at the way in which discussions around DPS meters and real-time parsing have been trending in MMOs. I… Read more “How Do You Solve A Social Problem In Games? A Second Look At DPS Meters, Parsing, and Communities”

One of my favorite and also least-favorite topics has cropped up again over the last few weeks, on blogs I follow and in the broader communities of… Read more “DPS Meters, Parsing, Toxicity, and The MMO Culture Around Self-Improvement and Shaming”

Over the last few months, I’ve written quite a bit about becoming disenchanted with World of Warcraft (generating an Eternal Crystal in the process). The game was… Read more “The Thing I Want Most in The World of Warcraft 10.0 Reveal Event”

I think at this point we all sort of know that Shadowlands has not been a good lore expansion, and it in fact took a premise and… Read more “I Like The Sylvanas Judgment Story On Its Own? – The Highs and Crushing Lows of Shadowlands Story”