• Everquest II Managing Editor
• Lineage 2 Managing Editor
• RIFT Managing Editor
• RuneScape Managing Editor
• Tera Managing Editor
• Any other MMO we don’t already have a portal for

Everquest 2 and Lineage 2 both have existing readers. Both portals receives thousands of views every months, but the content needs to be updated.

RIFT has some initial content, but needs additional tender loving care.

RuneScape has virtually no existing content and no userbase. However, it is one of the most popular online games worldwide.

Tera is anticipated to become one of the most explosive MMORPGs on the market.  Although this portal has no existing userbase, the potential is limitless.

To apply for any of these roles, please e-mail the Director of Content: syrus@stratics.com.

In other news, it’s the 31st December, which mean’s tomorrow’s next year.
As is ever the case, promises of great things into the new year.
The great things would come anyway, New Years just happens to be here, and a convenient time to sneak in a little mention that there are good things in the pipes.

Was sent this video earlier, mind blown. What a great video. Really shows you both sides of the respective games, from the view of a fan of both.

I am sure there will be a lot of debate between WoW and SWTOR, so go on, post below!

One of the multitude of reasons for this unrequited burden on my heart is the Free-to-Play catalogue.
I’ve commented in the past that it makes it super-easy to try out these games, with everything more or less under one Steam-y roof.

This past day, I’ve received notices that both APB Reloaded and Everquest 2 are now nestled comfily on Steam.
APB Reloaded being the re-release of Realtime Worlds‘ dramatically unsuccessful MMO; APB: All Points Bulletin.
Everquest 2 being the long-running sequel to Everquest, which I suppose is long-running enough that it doesn’t need to be introduced that way.

The Free-to-Play category currently contains 16 games, set up in such a way that trying them is barely a hassle.
You can check out the full list here; Free to Play Games on Steam

*Epic Music Score*

Here it is folks! The news we have been waiting for.

Pre-Load. Star Wars: The Old Republic. Is here.

Check your email inbox, it appears that the Early Access will start 7am EST on the 13th, not the 15th we were informed way-back-when. The post on the Dev Tracker on SWTOR.com still says 15th though. We will bring you up-to date information on this as we get it!

You can head over to your account page, right now, select the Pre Order option, and there it is.

There is some even better news, for those who got to test the beta during the previous two weeks, November 25th -28th and Dec 2nd – 4th. All you need to do is login to the game launcher and it will patch up. Easy.

“Early Game Access* for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ is only a few days away! Starting December 13, 2011, The Old Republic will begin emailing invitations to start your Early Game Access. Invitations will be sent throughout the Early Game Access period offering rolling access to the game in the order in which you redeemed your Pre-Order Code, so be sure to check your email inbox!”

We here at Stratics are very excited about the release of The Old Republic. There has been a few chats regarding pre orders, Sith and The Republic in our channels. You can contribute to these, or even create you own over at our forums.

Useful links:

Pre Load Announcement

SWTOR.Stratics

SWTOR Forums

*Epic Music Score*

“Item modding can now be done anywhere at anytime. No workbench required.”

When I read those words on the beta forums, I knew it was going to be one of the biggest changes to Star Wars: The Old Republic in recent months. Yet, what limitations were going to be imposed? Only on weapons? No companions gear modded? Well fear not, Bioware’s very own Emmanuel Lusinchi has posted an indepth breakdown of how mods have changed in the final build/release build of SWTOR.

He states “I’m not 100% happy about how the system interface and GUI works today (it is still a bit clunky) but at least it is functional”. Great honesty.

Below is general jist.

“- Crafters can now reverse engineer mods and create blue and purple mods.

– A new Custom quality (orange) was introduced to legitimize moddable items as their own quality and type.

– Mods can now be extracted from a Custom item. This is the single most important change and has many, many consequences. However, we feel that being able to slot a mod and then extract it back truly opens up the system and makes it a lot more fun, easy and safe to experiment with.

– Rather than have a whole bunch of unique mod types, some mods are now common to all items. This greatly helps players who are ‘going the mod route’ to stay relevant and competitive as they now have a much higher chance to find exactly the mods they need, level after level, be it from a crafter, at a planetary commendation vendor or by extracting it from another item.

– Partially moddable premium (green) items were removed as they essentially lied to the players: an item missing a mod slot would never be able to match a high end non-moddable item.

(Note: recipes for those orange appearances are discovered through Underworld Trading missions.)

– End game artifact quality (purple) gear is now partially moddable. Why moddable? Because that allows the players to customize stats such as critical, etc. to their exact desire. Why only partially? Because mods are now extractable… Think of it this way: it is easier to defeat the first boss from an Operation than the last boss. So we want to reward the players with the best possible loot for defeating the last boss and that loot is typically the Chest piece of a set. The first boss drops less interesting stuff, say boots. This may sound old school, and it is.

So, instead of letting that happen, we prevented the Armoring, Hilt and Barrel from being extracted, but we also made sure of dropping purple Armoring mods of equivalent power as Operation loot. This means that players going the mod route can still take their favorite orange armor and make it as good as a operation purple armor (with some temporary caveats).

– Some crafting recipes that allowed the creation of moddable armors and weapons have been replaced with non-moddable versions. Why the nerf? Because those recipes were no longer properly balanced once we allowed mod extraction. It became far cheaper and faster to create an item for the sole purpose of extracting every mods out of it than creating mods in the first place. This also allowed nearly every crafter to create every type of mods, which wasn’t very balanced either. Instead, the crafter can now make a non-moddable item for those players that enjoy that and, thanks to newly introduced recipes, a moddable (but empty slotted) version of the item.”

Useful links:

• Forum
• Stratics
• Mod information

*Epic Music Score*

Greetings Force users and Techies! This coming Saturday December 10th, the Official Star Wars: The Old Republic forums will be wiped, and no access given until December 15th at the earliest. Those lucky enough to gain early access will be able to start posting as soon as December the 15th, all others will need to wait until they have registered their games, as the forum will enter a subscription only mode for posting.

Fear not. We have our own SWTOR forums and Stratics site. We hope both of these will become a number one source for SWTOR information and communion! You can post freely, whether you are an active subscriber to SWTOR, or are just wanting to gather information.

May the Force be with you….

Useful links:

• Forum
• Stratics
• Closure Information

To nutshell it; $25k has been paid out to gamers, for making videos about games.
More after the jump.

Here’s the announcement video for you to watch:

So, there you have it; George is happy, and the directors are (presumably) happy, too.

I don’t want to make a big pitch out of this, but if you have even half an interesting in making videos about the games you play, and in money, then you should totally check out http://tgn.tv/way/.

Nexon has released a trailer for Combat Arms: Zombies, an iPhone game based off the Unreal 3 engines. Combat Arms: Zombies will be heavily based of of CA’s Fireteam mode. Combat Arms: Zombieswill be released in late November after being fully unveiled on November 10th at Korea’s G-Star game expo.

Nexon Mobile’s CEO, Albert Rim stated that “Using Epic Games’ cutting edge Unreal Engine technology, Combat Arms: Zombies will set a new standard for graphics and quality gameplay on mobile devices…Combat Arms: Zombies has been a major effort for us and it will help establish Nexon Mobile as a top developer of multi-platform games.”

Submitted by KuriJaVaba on Combat Arms Stratics.