Gamasutra Member Blogs: From in-house publishing to designing combos/chains

[In highlights from Gamasutra's Member Blogs, our bloggers write about diverse topics, such as the design of combos and chains, Star Wars: The Old Republic's decline, in-house publishing, and more.] Member Blogs can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while invitation-only Expert Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- are written by selected development professionals. We hope that our blog sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information, check out the official posting guidelines. This Week's Standout Member Blogs The design of combos and chains (Richard Terrell ) Richard Terrell examines why combos and chains are so interesting to gamers and game design. A writer writes...always? (Matt Waldron) Matt Waldron presents a brief philosophical discussion that challenges a commonly accepted method regarding the way writers and storytellers improve at their craft. Why SWTOR's 1.2 patch is doing exactly what the opposite of what it intended (Hillwins Lee) Four months have passed since Star Wars: The Old Republic released, and Hillwins Lee argues that the SWTOR subscription may have already reached its peak and started the inevitable decline. Here he looks at some of the key decisions that may have triggered it. The case for in-house publishing (Philip Athans) Philip Athans explains why you need to publish your own tie-in fiction... Don't give up the day job: An indie Windows Phone 7 postmortem (Dave Jones) It's more than three months since Brickbat, the first game from one-man indie studio Jeffalisk, released on Windows Phone. Dave Jones looks back on a what went right (not much) and what went wrong (plenty) -- and shares some less-than-impressive download figures.