The Painting Grind

Why do people get 'addicted' to collecting and painting miniatures for gaming? Some theories...

Competitive Gaming Round-Up

A few interesting tidbits have been around lately of interest to agoners. The biggest one is the excellent competitive card game Yomi finally coming to Steam on May 8th. Whilst I've played this game tons already in it's web version and it's physical form, this is still a huge deal as it will have much …

Bastion – Review

              Format: PC Reviewer: Remy77077 Approximate Time Spent playing at time of writing: 22 hours Modes of play: Single Player, Online Leaderboards Bastion looks & sounds really pretty and it's quite novel these days to see an action adventure game from an overhead isometric viewpoint rather than a 3D one. This …

The day competitive fighting games died?

Well, the FPS genre has all but been ruined by grinding, 'pay to win', 'grind to compete', 'free to play' models of sales that all but kill off any way to play those games as fundamentally competitive endeavours. The MOBA genre is only just about hanging on, but the anti-competitive designs like League of Legends …

Blood Brothers – Review

We did not really consider gambling 'fruit machines' (aka slot machines or just slots) when it came to defining the Agoners review criteria. They clearly aren't designed to be any kind of challenge or competitive game at all. The best fit they would have to our criteria would be under the "Toy / Experience" category …

Halo 4 lacking skill ranking

Well Halo 4 has gone one worse than Halo Reach even, and launched without any kind of skill-based ranking system, and now has a gameplay affecting grind exploitationware system too rather than a purely cosmetic one. These are absolutely horrible decisions for competitive gamers everywhere and make me wish I could go back in time …

Competitive Gaming 123

We've written so much here on Agoners about competitive gaming, as per our definitions, that I thought it might be useful to re-state a few things in a single article. A bit of a re-statement of our beliefs; a competitive gaming manifesto if you like. Gaming design for competitive gaming should always mean these three …

Guild Wars 2 – PvP done right?

I completely missed out on playing Guild Wars the first, because I thought it was just another MMO. Years afterwards when I got more into PC gaming I discovered it actually had a potentially decent competitive game hidden underneath the BS grinding veneer. So Guild Wars 2 is definitely on my agoners radar this time …

Korea to ban trade of commercial game items – great!

Korea prohibits trade of online game items. This is a great piece of news  as far as Agoners is concerned. Whilst their motivations are rather different, this does seriously hinder the money making options for any game design that is rewarding labour over other skills - ie: giving options to "grind". Hopefully the rest of …

DOTA 2 – Free to Play? Pay to Win? Grind to compete?

Interesting news tidbit today about DOTA 2.. Dota 2 will not be a pay-to-win game. All the items in the store are cosmetic, and don’t affect gameplay. All of the heroes will be available free of charge. We believe restricting player access to heroes could be destructive to game design, so it’s something we plan to …