Vague Patch Notes is a meta design column by Eliot Lefebvre. [Follow this column’s RSS feed]
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Vague Patch Notes: Learning to hate the MMORPGs you love
I had to teach myself how to hate Star Trek Online. It didn't come naturally to me.
If you've read the stuff that I've written...
Vague Patch Notes: The MMO starter experiences that fear new players
Last week, I talked a bit about power creep. But buried in there was something that you could easily miss as a guideline for...
Vague Patch Notes: Talking about power creep in MMOs
"Power creep" is a nasty term when talking about video games, and usually whenever it gets brought up, it gets brought up as a...
Vague Patch Notes: How long should you wait before opining on major changes in MMORPGs?
Earlier this week, I had a column about a major change in Final Fantasy XIV's content delivery schedule that had some pretty big effects....
Vague Patch Notes: Understanding what you understand in MMOs
One of the most dangerous and yet often-used phrases to say to anyone when it comes to pretty much any media is to claim...
Vague Patch Notes: How long do online games truly get to live?
I'm going to start this article by asking a question I don't actually want an answer to: How long has Minecraft been popular?
Objectively there...
Vague Patch Notes: Bad MMOs happen – but not because nobody cares
When I first started working at Massively-that-was, I got a bit of a wake-up call pretty early on when I made a joke about...
Vague Patch Notes: The war of the MMO builds
Talking about your build in an MMORPG can be oddly contentious with people. On the one hand, you are inevitably going to have people...
Vague Patch Notes: The unsettling optics of the Stars Reach Kickstarter
As soon as I saw the news that Stars Reach was going to be launching a Kickstarter, I immediately stood up, got dressed, and...
Vague Patch Notes: No, authenticity does not make video games successful
On December 12th, 2024, The Game Awards had its annual awards show, and the award for Game of the Year was presented by Larian...
Vague Patch Notes: How Throne and Liberty actually got my attention
Leading up to the release of Throne and Liberty, I was not particularly enthusiastic about the game's prospects on a whole. The reasons for...
Vague Patch Notes: My favorite five MMO columns of the year edition
So I don't usually do these for a couple reasons. For starters, they always feel kind of like self-promotion, an activity that I am...
Vague Patch Notes: MMORPG accelerationism is a stupid sucker’s game
The most recent Warframe update starts with a solid chunk of story, and the story that it tells is that of a time loop....
Vague Patch Notes: EVE Frontier’s blockchain foundation makes it a worse MMO
It is a mark of pride for our readers that basically none of you are having CCP Games trying to play around with the...
Vague Patch Notes: Nostalgia isn’t the problem with pining for your MMO past
So it hasn't been long since World of Warcraft launched a new set of WoW Classic servers, except this time it's WoW Classic Classic,...
Vague Patch Notes: MMORPGs are more popular than you think
Last week, I ended the Vague Patch Notes column with something of a tease suggesting that maybe, just maybe, MMORPGs are not an unpopular...
Vague Patch Notes: The ridiculous marketing doublespeak around MMORPGs
There is a lot to make fun of when it comes to New World, and it comes in many forms, from excusing bad decisions...
Vague Patch Notes: Going solo isn’t a problem in MMORPGs
So I'm wrapping up a month of talking about how MMORPGs are by necessity social games. These are games in which you need other...
Vague Patch Notes: Living like a rock in MMORPGs
So if you are anything close to my age, you probably do not think of Simon & Garfunkel's music as being anything remotely "raw."...
Design Mockument: Exploring alternatives to the typical MMO trinity
Here's a fun thing for you: I swear that way, way back before the game launched, there were documents from the Guild Wars 2...
